


Elegy

by Dog_Bearing_Gifts



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: 1942, AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coco AU, F/M, Idea not mine, Imelda investigates AU, Imelda is cursed AU, Imelda visits the Land of the Dead, Inspired By Tumblr, Pre-Movie, Pre-movie AU, What-If, protagonist swap, someone other than Miguel is cursed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-04-29 02:11:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 51,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14462751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dog_Bearing_Gifts/pseuds/Dog_Bearing_Gifts
Summary: Imelda never expected to see her former husband's songbook among Ernesto de la Cruz's personal effects. She never expected it to fall into her hands.And she never expected to see Héctor on the other side of the veil.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Another idea that isn’t mine, but adapted from a post by daughterofthemoon99 on Tumblr, exploring an AU where Imelda is the one to visit the Land of the Dead. Although that post posited that she visit a year or two after his disappearance, since she would be more likely to investigate and more open to having her assumptions proven wrong, I figured a later timeline would provide more opportunities for conflict, and got permission for the change.

Héctor’s songbook.

Imelda’s thoughts were a blank save for those two words, the name of the thin leatherbound volume resting in her hands. Since bringing it home, she’d brought herself to open it exactly once, just long enough for the familiar handwriting and lyrics to hit her like a dash of cold water. She’d slammed it closed immediately, but it had been too late. She might as well have found her former husband and had him talk to her awhile.

His songbook.

Among Ernesto de la Cruz’s things.

He’d been buried in Santa Cecilia; avoiding that bit of news had proven impossible. Such a famous man, returned to his hometown at last—it was all anyone talked about. Perhaps Imelda could have kept from hearing talk of that músico had her attempts to barricade herself in the workshop been successful, but for all its acclaim, the zapatería was not yet capable of running without intervention from its founder. This quandary or that complaint called her to the front, where she was subjected, yet again, to the talk of the town.

She shouldn’t have taken the book. She shouldn’t have been where she could see it fall, shouldn’t have been close enough to be struck with familiarity when it hit the ground, but it was too late for all that. All she had now was the present, the book, and the memories it had dredged up.

“Mamá?”

Imelda slipped the songbook beneath her pillow. “Sí, Coco?”

Her daughter gave her a longer look than was necessary, a question behind her eyes. _¿Estás bien?_

Imelda had seen that question lurking in her daughter’s eyes more often than she would have liked over the past few weeks, ever since that songbook found its way into her hands. Coco had never vocalized it, but Imelda knew it was only a matter of time before her fraying nerves drove her daughter to more than silent support.

And when that finally happened, Imelda didn’t trust herself to brush the question off.

“Julio has a question for you.”

“What’s the question?”

Coco’s mouth tipped. “He says he can’t _explain_ it. He has to _show_ you.”

Imelda couldn’t help a small smile of her own as she got to her feet. Coco’s husband rarely asked questions using words alone. If he wanted to know where a tool was stored, he wouldn’t say, _“Where do you want me to put this?”_ The first word, drawn out and paired with a questioning look as he held the tool, was enough for him.

Imelda fell into step beside her daughter, allowing her quick strides to push the songbook as close to the back of her mind as it would go.

********

That Día de los Muertos was as beautiful a holiday as anyone could have asked for. The sun made its way across a cloudless blue sky, and a soft breeze ruffled her dress and tugged at loose pieces of her hair.

The preparations passed quickly, without incident. Her familia approached them with the same commitment to efficiency they displayed in the workshop—do what needs to be done, do it well, and then move on to the next task until there are no more tasks to do. A blessing on one hand: she could assign a task and trust its recipient would complete it, pausing only to seek her guidance where needed.

A curse on the other: her mind was free to wander toward the songbook.

Whenever she’d remembered that songbook, back when she still liked to torment herself with thoughts of Héctor, she had imagined him thumbing through the pages with that smile on his face, trying to determine which of _her_ songs would best charm the woman in the next room. _“I was thinking of you when I wrote that,”_ he’d say when the song worked its magic. Maybe the next song he wrote would indeed be for that new woman; maybe he would have moved on to another romance by then.

In no case did she imagine him giving that book to Ernesto.

Imelda pushed her thoughts back from the songbook. She’d tried to unravel the mystery in the months since it fell into her hands, and all she’d discovered was a lack of murmurs regarding its disappearance. Which hinted that it was not one of his more important effects, but then, why return it to Santa Cecilia at all?

No. Best to think of other things. Today was a day for family.

She managed to keep her thoughts more or less on the present. By sunset, she smiled as little Victoria walked through the complex, watching her feet as if she suspected her shoes would flee without supervision. Coco had once managed to coax it out of her that she was making up stories in her head, though Victoria had never volunteered details. At least she seemed to be enjoying herself, even if her wanderings took her closer and closer to Imelda’s bedroom.

Imelda’s smile fell as she pictured Victoria wandering in, perhaps catching sight of an unconcealed corner of the songbook, opening it….

Coco was there before Imelda could move, steering Victoria away from the corridors and back toward the rest of the family. Imelda still waited until both were a safe distance away and hurried in.

The songbook was not visible from where she stood—a small relief—but under a pillow was hardly the best place to keep something hidden. She left the door slightly ajar, took the songbook in her hand, and glanced round.

It had been safe under her mattress for the past few weeks, but that could have been plain luck, and luck could run out. A drawer was the next obvious choice—though it might be _too_ obvious. Perhaps she could—

The door slammed shut.

Imelda jumped, slipping the songbook into her apron pocket. She froze, listening, and sure enough there were voices outside the door.

“Mamá?” Coco’s. “Is…is everything all right?”

Dios mio. It must have looked like _she’d_ slammed the door on her family, on _this_ of all days. “I’m fine, mija. It was just the wind.”

There was a long pause at the other side of the door. "Mamá?”

Imelda’s heart skipped a beat—but there was no reason for that. None. She must have spoken more softly than she’d intended. “I said I’m fine, Coco.”

The latch clicked. Coco stood in the doorway, casting a glance through the room. Her gaze lingered on Imelda no longer than it did on the window or the bed. “She’s not in here.”

_What?_

“Do you think she went a little further down?”

“I _saw_ her come in here, Julio,” Coco said. “I—I don’t know where she could have gone…”

Coco was fooling. She had decided, against her nature and all evidence to the contrary, that it would be funny to pretend not to see her own mother. Perhaps she’d carry the charade awhile, but Julio? “Julio, stop this. I—” 

They turned back toward the rest of the complex, letting the door close in her face. Imelda hurried to the door and grasped at the knob, her hand passing through as if one or the other were made of smoke.

No charade. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was no charade. 

She had no time to think what might have happened; there were endless possibilities and each was too bizarre to contemplate. She needed out of that room, needed to get someone’s attention, needed to find a way to correct…whatever it was that had happened. 

Imelda drew a few quick breaths to steady herself. The first task was simple enough. The first one was doable. If her hand passed through the knob, then the door itself would function much the same way. She had only to purposely walk into a door.

She closed her eyes, clenched her fists. This was fine. This was _nothing_. This was just what had to be done.

She took the biggest step she could.

When she opened her eyes, the door was behind her and her daughter was already a few meters away. By instinct she started to call out, remembered what had happened before, and started forward instead.

Then froze.

Somewhere, somewhere close by, was music. Not the muffled, impersonal strains of a neighboring celebration, nor the passing notes of a roving band of musicians on their way to learn a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget. If she didn’t know any better, she’d have thought it was coming from the next room.

It couldn’t be. 

It _wasn’t_. 

Yet there it was. 

Music. Soft and intimate guitar notes playing as clear as day.

Imelda backed from the door, trying to keep her breathing steady. She couldn’t be touched, couldn’t be seen, couldn’t stop hearing music in a house that hadn’t welcomed so much as a phonograph for twenty-one years.

A dream. She was dreaming. It was still the night before Día de Muertos and this and everything that had come before it had been a prelude to the strangest nightmare her mind had to offer. She backed away from the music, toward the rest of the family.

“No, I haven’t seen her.” Concern already laced Rosita’s voice. “Are you _sure_ you saw her go into that room?”

Imelda turned as Coco nodded. “We checked the other rooms, but she wasn’t there, either.”

“I’ll help you look,” Rosita said. Imelda made a grab for her hand, but she might as well have grasped at water.

The music was no fainter here; if anything, it surrounded her now, playing from everywhere and nowhere. No one else mentioned it. No one batted an eye. No pained look crossed Coco’s face; no look of fearful confusion crossed anyone else’s.

Imelda backed from the search beginning in her honor. They wouldn’t find her if she stayed, but she knew that tune and she couldn’t be where the music was when a voice joined that guitar.

She didn’t realize she’d gone through the gate until it filled her vision, growing smaller as she moved ever backward. Somehow, she got the presence of mind to turn around even with the music following, though it had grown a little fainter now that she was out. Away from her family.

On Día de los Muertos.

She had to go back. 

Their concern would become panic if she didn’t return soon, but how was she to return when she couldn’t be seen or heard? Still, she had to go back, try to communicate somehow, music or no music—

In turning to glance behind, she hadn’t slowed her pace; a sudden collision brought her attention back to the path before her. Imelda looked up, irritated remark at the ready, but it died on her lips. 

There, neatly dressed in slacks, hat, and jacket, with a clipboard in hand, was a skeleton.

 


	2. Part Two

An hour prior, Imelda would have rationalized the sight of a wide-eyed, fully clothed skeleton away with any number of excuses. She was sleeping. It wasn’t a skeleton, but a glance at something else—a bundle of sticks, perhaps—taken too quickly and from too great a distance to see clearly.

But after becoming a ghost to her own family and the victim of phantom music, when faced with a skeleton that, from all appearances, could move under its own power, Imelda could only shut her eyes tight. There was no skeleton in front of her. She wasn’t meters from her home as her family searched for her. She hadn’t walked through a closed door and the front gate to escape music only she could hear, she hadn’t failed to grasp her daughter-in-law’s hand, and she most certainly had _not_ bumped into a walking skeleton.

“S…Señora? Can you….can you see me?”

She didn’t want to open her eyes, but a hesitant tap on her shoulder demanded she do so. Sure enough, there was the skeleton, clipboard in hand and a faint orange glow surrounding him.

A glow, she realized after a quick glance at her hand, that clung to her as well.

“Sì,” she said. “Why?”

“Why….”

“Why can I see you? What is going on? And _why_ am I glowing?”

“I don’t know; _you’re_ the one who’s supposed to be alive!”

“Supposed to—“ Imelda’s fingers flew to her neck in search of a pulse, finding one in seconds. “I _am_ alive!”

“You _are_ alive,” the skeleton repeated. “And you can see the dead.”

The dead. So that’s what this skeleton—this _man_ was. As if to confirm, she caught another skeleton out the corner of her eye, leaving a nearby home as he wrote frantically on his clipboard.

It was true.

As a child, she had listened to her parents and grandparents and other adults speak of the dead returning to visit on Dìa de Muertos. She’d helped make pan de muerto and place photos and gifts on the ofrenda, lit candles and scattered cempasúchil listened to and shared stories of departed family. She’d carried on the same traditions as she’d been taught, and simply believed there was something more to it, that the warmth she’d felt wrapped around her shoulders following the death of each new person she loved was a fond embrace and not her mind attempting to dull a grief that threatened to hollow her out from the inside.  

It _was_ them.

It _was_ true.

All if it was true and it was happening, right now, right _there_ and for the first time she could see it. She couldn’t see her deceased family, not yet, but this nervous-looking man with a clipboard was proof and she wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or sweep him into a hug.

“I—I have to go back. Mi familia—they’ll arrive any minute—“

“I’m afraid that might have to wait.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Er, Señora….has anything else…. _unusual_ happened tonight?”

Imelda knew enough to tell the difference between an inquisitive question and an investigative one. The former could carry any answer in the world, and the asker simply wished to see which one it was. The latter, however, was different. The asker was not in search of any sort of knowledge, but of one specific answer—one they were often convinced was the only answer they’d receive.

And she knew, before weighing her options against the look on the man’s face, that she wouldn’t like the consequences of the only answer she had to give.

She could lie, or give a half-truth. _Just this,_ she could tell him, then go back to her family and wait for…something. See if it went away on its own. No sooner had the thought entered her head than a family of four walked right through her, one after the other, leaving her with a sick feeling in her stomach—a familiar one, she realized with a start. Her nerves had been stretched too tight to allow the nausea to properly register when she walked through the door.

“A few things, yes.”

He paused, clearly mulling something over. If he’d had lips, she was certain he’d have chewed one.

“I’m…going to need to take you back with me, Señora.”

Imelda had known, from the moment that thoughtful look crossed his face, that she wouldn’t like what he was about to say. She’d braced herself as well as she could, and it still hit her like a slap. By instinct she backed a few steps, reaching for her shoe.

“Oh, no no. I am _not_ going back with _you._ ”

“Señora—“ He started forward, but halted when confronted with a boot.

“If you think I am going to _follow you_ to—to—to wherever you came from—“

“I—“

“ _No!_ You will explain to me _why_ you want to drag me off to—to—who-knows where for who-knows-what-reason and _why,_ of all the people here, you thought _I_ would fall for it!”

The skeleton man kept his hands in the air for a long minute as Imelda kept him at bay with her shoe. Finally, he sighed, reached into his suit pocket, and pulled out a badge. He handed it over, watched her study it.

“I’m with the government, Señora,” he said. “This….whatever happened to you….they’ll know how to fix it.”

******

She pulled her shoe back on only because, for some reason surpassing her understanding, the ability to walk through solid walls did not mean her feet were protected from the road. Every few steps she gave a long look to her companion, who introduced himself as Domingo Almarza. His badge looked official enough, and didn’t look any less official each time he begrudgingly caved to her demands to see it again.

His story withstood scrutiny, too—or as much scrutiny as her limited experience with the bureaucracy of the dead allowed. He was a photo agent, one tasked with retrieving copies of ofrenda pictures and returning them to the departures agents in the Land of the Dead. There, the photos would be compared to the dead themselves, at which point they would be admitted access to the bridge or denied it.

“It’s a lot of notes,” he said when Imelda asked how they kept them all straight. He showed her a form as they walked—a blank one. He’d handed off his small photo collection to a skeleton at the corner of the street, who snatched them up and rode a bicycle at top speed in what appeared to be the same direction they were going. Even before that, Almarza had refused to let her see the clipboard.

About a dozen blanks, maybe more, filled the form. There was room for the deceased’s name, family name, location of the ofrenda, owner of the ofrenda, and the date the photo was taken from the ofrenda, among others. After twenty years of meticulous bookkeeping, she couldn’t help being impressed. “You do account for everything, don’t you?”

“Ay, well, no photo on an ofrenda, no crossing over. We need to have everything recorded in case something goes wrong.”

Imelda looked over the form again. Much as she would have liked an excuse to demand the clipboard again, and a loophole to ensure she got it, she could understand his hesitance to hand it over. A lost photo or set of notes would mean someone’s papá or tia or primo barred from their family on Día de los Muertos. Even if he had no photos at the moment, she could see him clinging to the place they were kept from force of habit.

 _If he’s telling the truth,_ she thought, but it was halfhearted. This was quite the elaborate lie, for a chance meeting, and the context of it was so bizarre she might have dismissed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

Almarza led her through Santa Cecilia, straight to the graveyard. Aside from other men bearing clipboards, moving quickly between homes and the street as they scribbled details on the proper forms, few dead milled the streets. “First in line,” he explained. Imelda thought she caught a hint of irritation in his tone.

“And what is wrong with _that_?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly.

The first thing Imelda saw, upon their approach to the graveyard, was Ernesto de la Cruz’s mausoleum. An enormous marble thing, it overlooked every other grave from its perch on a hill that had once been a peaceful island. In years past, she had stood on that hill and swept her gaze over every grave in Santa Cecilia, pausing at those belonging to her departed family. There, with the sunlight on her shoulders and hair and perhaps a breeze playing with her skirts, she had simply watched—and remembered.

They passed the mausoleum, and then all she could see was the bridge.

Behind it, the setting sun lit the sky in gold and red and orange; against that, it almost appeared as a ray of sunlight itself, touching the ground some meters from the entrance to the graveyard. As they drew closer, she realized that what she had thought was some sort of water falling from the bridge was actually cempasúchil, bound together and cascading down into darkness. The bridge, the whole bridge, was millions and millions of petals.

“Señora?”

Imelda shook her head slightly. Invisible. Untouchable. She had to get to…wherever this man worked and find someone capable of undoing whatever had happened. The bridge was useless if she was too busy staring to cross it.

Foot traffic seemed to be increasing by the time they reached the bridge, if only marginally. They passed an older couple walking hand in hand, both of whom stopped in their tracks to watch her pass. “As if you haven’t seen a living person before,” she huffed.

They looked down and quickly moved along.

“We go to visit the living,” Almarza said. “You don’t often come to visit us.”

“ _Often_?”

“It’s happened before. I just don’t know anyone who’s seen it.”

There were other skeletons on the bridge, white- and grey-haired grandparents mostly, though she spotted a few even younger than she. A cold pit of sorrow formed in her stomach. Death came for everyone in the end, but the end didn’t need to come so soon.

She stole another glance at Almarza. Much of his hair was hidden beneath his hat, but she could see a few strands of grey. Perhaps he wasn’t as old as he should have been, but he likely would have at least had a chance to meet any grandchildren or nieces and nephews in his family. Even if he didn’t have much time with them, he would have at least gotten to learn their names.

*****

“That is quite the curse.”

The clerk behind the desk might as well have slapped her. “ _Curse_?”

A wan smile quirked his mouth. How these skeletons managed to smile without lips remained a mystery, but far be it from her to complain. “A living woman, transported to the Land of the Dead without warning? Seems to be a curse.”  

Her arrival in the Department of Family Reunions had, after turning more heads than she would have liked, been followed by a hurried explanation from Almarza and then—waiting. Sitting in an office while clerks and assistants rushed about with papers and books, shouting back and forth as a pile formed on the desk. Then she waited again as the head clerk went through the pile, dismissing documents only to go over them again in light of what he’d read in the book lying open between stacks of papers.

She managed to gather her thoughts enough to ask the only question worth asking. “So how do we get rid of it?”

“That,” the clerk said slowly, “depends on what you stole.”

 _Stole._ Another slap. “I—I didn’t—I _found_ it.”

He did not look convinced. “Whatever you call it, Señora, _removing_ items from the dead is no small offense. _Especially_ on Día de Muertos,” he added with a jab of his pen.

Part of her wanted to snatch that pen out of his hands and break it, but she needed him on her side more than she needed ink on her dress. “I didn’t find it _today._ ”

He had no brows to raise, but his browbones did it anyway. “Well, then, whatever you took must’ve been cursed already, if it’s waited this long to take effect.”

Imelda sat back, resisting the urge to rub her temples. A dull ache had taken up residence in her head, but she wasn’t about to give this clerk a chance to turn it into an excuse to chide her. _“You see? Stealing from the dead is nothing but a headache, in the end.”_ With her current luck, he would be just the sort of man who liked puns.

“So. Tell me what you took, and we can find a way out of this.”

Her hand went to her apron pocket. If this man insisted on convicting her on a technicality, then yes, she had taken it from Ernesto de la Cruz. He wouldn’t know the songbook as Héctor’s, but as Ernesto’s. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to name it as such. “A songbook. It…was with Ernesto de la Cruz’s things.”

Now his eyes widened, his jaw dropped open. “You stole from _Ernesto de la Cruz_?”

“I already told you, I didn’t—“

He cut her off with a chuckle. “Well, you don’t do anything halfway, do you?”

She tried to think of a retort sharp enough to wipe the smile off his face, but before she had one, he’d already moved on.

“Since the item you stole belonged to de la Cruz, it seems the way to undo it will be with his blessing.”

Imelda sat back, fixing the clerk with a glare that drew no reaction. “There’s not another way?”

“Not that I’m aware of. The surest way to undo a curse is with a blessing. You stole from de la Cruz, you _should_ need de la Cruz’s blessing.”

She continued her glare, but the clerk did not recant. Either she truly did need de la Cruz’s blessing, or this clerk was intent upon forcing her to seek it for some reason that escaped her.

“Fine,” she said after a moment. “Where is he?”

******

“Señor de la Cruz! Where’s your guitar?”

With some effort, Ernesto suppressed a wince, covering it with a grin. “It—ay, who needs that old thing? You have _me_.”

The assistant clerk’s frown remained. Ernesto scrambled for an explanation. The guitar wasn’t on a proper ofrenda. He was waylaid by fans and never made it to his mausoleum. He could not, for some reason, see a guitar displayed in plain sight above his casket. Any explanation but the truth.

“Oh.” If he tried to hide his disappointment, he did a poor job of it. “I would have liked to see it….”

 _I never made it to the mausoleum_ would be an awful excuse. Not only had he been spotted, but they might pressure him to return, ensure a clear path for him. He would need another excuse to keep his distance from that guitar—unless, of course, the guitar sensed his presence the moment he set foot in the graveyard, and then—

“In any case,” the assistant said, straightening his shoulders, “we have a bit of a predicament.”

“Oh?”

“It seems a woman in the Land of the Living got herself cursed. She needs your blessing to return.”

Ernesto blinked as the words set in. Nothing more about the guitar. No accusations; more than a trace of curiosity, but the assistant had put that aside in favor of the matter at hand.

There was only a woman.  

Who needed his blessing.

His smile became genuine. “Of—of course. Forgive me, I was…not expecting that. Where is she?”

Their walk to the station and down a hall to the office in question was not a long one, but he still had enough time to ponder what he might find. It would be a young woman, certainly; one naïve enough to attract a curse but sweet enough to realize what she’d done. She would be remorseful, blubbering out apologies to a clerk who did his best to gently explain her fate and how it might be undone. _“Please,”_ she might say, _“please, I didn’t mean it, I only want to go home…”_

They stopped at a door, and Ernesto paused to don the most reassuring smile he had. She would be upset, of course; he would in all likelihood be greeted by the sound of sobbing. She had his blessing already, but surely he would be forgiven if he teased her before bestowing it.

The door opened, and Ernesto’s mind went blank.

She was older than he remembered; but then, it had been over twenty years since he’d last seen her. Dark hair still braided and wrapped in the same style she always wore, dress covered by a leather work apron, lips drawn into a sour line. His smile had fallen, but he couldn’t think how to recover it or explain its sudden absence.

She regarded him. He thought he saw a sliver of interest—or was that suspicion?—cut through her annoyance. He had to say something, had to keep her mind away from questions, but he could only stare.

“Imelda,” he said after too long a silence. “What…what are you doing here?”


	3. Part Three

Ernesto de la Cruz was not what she had expected.

There was an image in her mind—that of a young, broad-shouldered músico with an easy smile and a red mariachi suit, telling a story over the kitchen table as her former husband dissolved in laughter. Imposing that over the skeleton in the sparkling white suit before her made the sight less jarring, more familiar, but the expression he wore—as if she had entered a locked room to find him with his pants around his ankles—was not what she remembered. It was not the look _she_ would have worn upon meeting a woman who had once been a sister-in-law in all but name.

The long silence that settled between them only reminded her how unwelcome it was.  

“Imelda.” She had a sudden memory of him saying her name just that way when she’d walked in on him and Héctor plotting a tour without her knowledge—a plan Héctor swore up and down he’d intended to share once it was solidified. “What….what are you doing here?”

She raised an eyebrow. “I thought they would have explained it to you.”

“They explained.” He glanced at his hand, apparently took a moment to remember it still held the door open, and stepped fully inside the office. “They just didn’t tell me _you_ were the one who…Dios mio, what _happened_?”

As little as Imelda wanted to see yet another look of shock turned upon her when she explained how the curse came to be, the question was a chance to learn the truth. One of two men who knew how he came about Héctor’s songbook stood before her. She couldn’t let the moment pass her by.

Her first instinct was to demand to know what he knew. Why Héctor handed his beloved songbook over to a friend, why said friend had evidently chosen to be buried with it rather than offer it to the woman who had inspired many of the book’s contents. She would have rather had the chance to refuse it than nothing at all.

But the clerk was there, and she had already lost any chance at earning his favor by taking an item belonging to a dead músico. A quieter approach would take her further to the blessing she needed.  

She bit her lip, as though in something approaching remorse. “There was a songbook on the ground. I think it was left behind on the way to your burial. It must have fallen.”

“And you wanted to see what it was,” Ernesto finished. “It…out of curiosity, what did it look like?”

“Just an old, leatherbound songbook.” _It looked exactly like Héctor’s,_ she didn’t add. The conclusion would be stronger if he drew it himself. “I don’t even know why it was with your things. You must have had _dozens_ of songbooks over the years.”

His wry smile didn’t approach his eyes. “Ay, not as many as I would have had, were it not for that bell. Did you read it?”

“No.” That much was true.

“You kept it with you and didn’t read it?”

“I believe that’s what I just said.”

“Imelda, I’ve been dead for months.”

Before she could ask why, exactly, he had so many questions about what was nothing more than one songbook among many, the clerk, perhaps sensing a fight, stepped between them.

“I suppose you want to get home, Señora Rivera?”

The answer was obvious, but she was too busy holding back a retort to give it. He turned to Ernesto.  

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cempasúchil, would you?”

Ernesto blinked, looked to the floor, glanced around, lifted his boot, and retrieved a petal from the sole.

“Good. Now. Hold it just like that, then look at the living and say her name.”

“Imelda.”

She didn’t expect the petal to do anything more than remain in Ernesto’s hand, but she saw the clerk frown.

“Keep—keep going. Say ‘I give you my blessing.’”

“I give you my blessing.”

The clerk’s frown deepened.

“What is it now?” Imelda couldn’t keep the irritation from her tone and she didn’t try.

“Well, the petal _should_ glow, but it isn’t.”

“I can see that.”

“Try taking it anyway and see what happens.”

Imelda reached for the petal, only to draw her hand back with a sharp hiss of breath, cradling it in the other.

Bone.

Three of her fingers were stripped to it, and her pinkie and thumb showed it at the tips. A translucent outline hovered a few centimeters away—what was left of her skin, she presumed—but if she touched a finger, she touched bone.

“This….” She swallowed. “This is part of the curse?”

“Sí,” the clerk said. To his credit, his tone bore no trace of accusation or satisfaction. “Try—try taking the petal.”

She snatched the petal away. Nothing. No clap of thunder, no flash of lightning, no gust of wind sending her back across the bridge. A cold, sinking feeling settled in her stomach.

“Why didn’t it work?” Ernesto asked.

“It should have. Your songbook sent her here, your blessing should have sent her back. Unless she were to try giving the book back….”

The words were like a jolt. “Would it work?”

“It might. There isn’t a guarantee, but it’s worth a try.”

He was right, of course. Handing it over was the surest chance she had. Give Héctor’s songbook back to the man who’d had it in his possession when he died, and possibly go home. End the curse’s progression and spend the rest of the holiday with her family. Rid herself of the book and all the questions attached.

It would be simple. It would be prudent. And she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I don’t have it.”

“You’re sure?” That was Ernesto.

“I’m sure.” Her hand wanted to stray to her apron pocket to ensure it was still there, as if the weight of the songbook wasn’t confirmation enough, and she forced herself to look at the curse’s progression again. “Is there another way?”

“Well….” The clerk drew out the word as he went to the books and papers again. “I _think_ a family blessing might be enough. This isn’t strictly a family matter, but it _could_ work.”

 _Could work_ was better than nothing, and enough to warrant a small sigh of relief. “I’ll just find them, then, and—“

“Ah, there may be a _slight_ problem,” the clerk said.

“ _How_ slight?”

“Well, it _is_ Día de Muertos. I’m sure they’re off visiting family by now, in the Land of the Living.”

“You’ll have a record of where they went, won’t you? Tell me where they are and I’ll follow them.”

“Er….I believe Almarza explained that one needs a photo on an ofrenda to cross the bridge?”

“But I’m _still living._ ”

“Which means no one will have had a reason to put your photo up this year.”

Dread settled around her shoulders, building quickly to anger as the events of the evening flew together into an image. “You mean to tell me,” she said, crumpling the petal in her fist, “that I could have had this curse _lifted_ by now if _your photo agent_ had simply let me be?”

“Now, Señora, I don’t even know if a family blessing will lift this—“

“It could! He could have told me to try it, or found someone who knew what they were talking about before dragging me off—“

“At sunset? When agents are scrambling for photos and every officer has four cases at once? Maybe if you’d gotten yourself cursed _now_ we’d have someone to spare, but—“

“What if I found them?”

It wasn’t the last thing Imelda had expected Ernesto to say, but it wasn’t the first. Judging from the clerk’s moment of slack-jawed blinking, it wasn’t what he’d expected to hear, either.

“My photo is on at least half the ofrendas in México,” Ernesto went on with a laugh and a smile. “Tell me where her family is, I can bring them back, she gets her blessing, everything goes back to the way it should be.”

The offer would have seemed more generous, had he not failed to send her home moments ago, but it made more sense than Imelda cared to admit. Save for one small issue. “You don’t know most of my family.”

“She’s right,” the clerk said. “And I’m sure border agents would rather trust those photos with people who are trained to handle them.”

“They’re _photos._ How much training do you need?”

The clerk’s long look said everything that needed to be said. “I’ll see if there are any photo agents available,” he said, turning to Imelda. “Their shifts should be over, or almost over by now. And we’ll see if there are any relatives of yours who haven’t crossed yet.”

She glanced at her hand again. It seemed to have spread no further, but she had a sneaking suspicion it would progress more than she liked within the hour. “How long do I have before this is…?”

“Permanent? Sunrise. That’s how these things tend to work.”

“Sunrise,” she repeated. There were hours to go. The darkness in the city was a recent development, not something to fear. When the sky began to lighten once more, then she could panic.

“Do you want me to stay with her while you bring her family back? So she’s not alone.”

Ernesto’s attention was on the clerk and Imelda’s was on the window, so she allowed herself a moment to roll her eyes.

“I think it’ll be better if you wait as close to the Santa Cecilia bridge as possible,” the clerk told her.

Imelda nodded, the knot in her stomach loosening some. She hadn’t been given a guarantee that the curse would be lifted. There was no promise that she would be home by sunrise. But there was a chance, and that was better than nothing.

******

She had the songbook.

Perhaps she didn’t have it _with her_ , Ernesto thought as Imelda was shuffled out of the office and down the hall. She claimed not to, and the clerk, from all appearances, believed her. He had no reason not to take her at her word.

Ernesto had no proof she’d brought it with her. No evidence beyond the question and hesitation preceding her claim. Even with Imelda, that wasn’t always enough; sometimes she liked to gather all available information before revealing she’d never needed it in the first place.

Sometimes.

Not always.

But she _had_ the book. Whether she had it with her or in her home, she had Héctor’s songbook, she knew what it was, and she had her suspicions about how he’d taken possession of it.  

“How long will it take to find her family, do you think?”

“Hard to say. They might be at home where we think they’ll be, they might be somewhere else in town, they might be on the way back while we’re on the way there and we’ll just miss them.” He sighed. “Fortunately, she has a pretty big family. She’s got a lot of chances to go home.”

Chances that would be useless if she stayed long enough. “Your…system, whatever you use, does it find _everyone_ in her family?”

One browbone arched in interest, or the beginnings of suspicion. “We want to make sure she has the best chance at going home. The more names we pull back, the better.”  

“Of course.” Héctor’s name would be among those presented, though the fact no one in the Department of Family Reunions knew of his connection to the songbook would make him no more attractive as a candidate than any other. “But there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”

“Not unless you know some other way around a double curse.”

“Double?”

“I don’t see how else she could steal a songbook weeks before Día de Muertos and still wind up here.”

“How…” With some effort, he kept his voice from faltering. “How did the original curse happen?”

“I was hoping _you’d_ know something about that.”

“She said it’s just another songbook.”

The clerk’s expression was not unreadable, not in the slightest. There was mistrust there, and a hunch that Ernesto wasn’t divulging everything he knew. But Ernesto couldn’t tell what might be behind it—whether the clerk thought he knew of a previous incident that didn’t involve him, or of a previous incident that did.

“You said she has until sunrise?”

“Sí.”

Sunrise. Ideally, that was more than enough time for Imelda to make it home—or to learn why her husband never returned. If she found him, talked to him, put together what he knew with what she’d learned….

“What can I do to help?”

The clerk closed a book and stacked a file on top. “If you don’t know most of her family or why your blessing couldn’t send her home, I don’t think there’s much you _can_ do.”

It was an insult and they both knew it. “There must be something. The poor woman will die at sunrise.”

The stack of books and files grew by a few more before the clerk sighed, bracing both hands on the pile. “Try and learn which songbook she stole. You’d know more about what might’ve cursed it than she would. Then, maybe, we can find out for sure what might send her home.”

Ernesto nodded, slowly at first but then more readily. Finding Imelda wouldn’t be difficult. Nor would it be a challenge to keep her from admitting whose songbook she had taken. If he kept her talking in circles—or wandering in them, should it come to that—until she found a primo or abuelo willing to send her home, he could prevent her from stumbling across the truth.

And if she never made it home by sunrise….

It wouldn’t be ideal. Any solution that placed her within proximity to Héctor was anything but desirable. But discrediting a witness hadn’t proven difficult in Héctor’s case, even if all he’d needed to dismiss were claims of friendship and writing the songs that had elevated Ernesto de la Cruz to fame. Allegations of murder would be trickier.

If it came to that.

Ernesto left the office promising to learn what he could about the songbook and report back. For now, keeping her from Héctor was the best option. 

And if that option soured, there was always sunrise. 


	4. Part Four

Héctor knew he should have joined the sunset rush to the bridge.

Even accounting for the few minutes it took to sing to both Coco and Imelda, the crowds lasted long enough that he could have melted into them easily, become one of thousands intent on crossing the bridge the moment it opened, taken advantage of border agents too harried to properly compare a picture to a face before stamping approval.

It had never happened before, but there was a first time for everything.

Against his better judgment, Héctor had stayed in Shantytown, enjoying the good company until darkness had fallen and the worst of the crowds were either in the Land of the Living or back in anticipation of the fireworks. While the line for security was by no means short, the crowds had thinned enough that one of the guards gave him a longer look than he would have liked—the kind that seemed to cut right through any disguise.

He sniffed and thrust his chin into the air. He’d hidden his goatee, and he’d been assured that the wide-brimmed hat he wore concealed his face well enough. All he had to do was make it to the counter, bluster and huff when told they couldn’t find his photo, and storm across the bridge before anyone thought to stop him. Little as he relished the thought of screaming at someone who was just doing their job, he told himself he could apologize once he returned. Once he’d spent a few hours with Imelda and Coco.

The line moved forward again, and Héctor stole another glance at the guards. A third had joined their group, though this one didn’t look like one of those he’d grown accustomed to seeing at the bridge. A last-minute replacement, maybe? But no, there seemed to be the usual number of guards posted; they wouldn’t send an extra officer on a night when all available personnel were out in force.

Héctor took a few steps forward when the woman behind him gave a pointed sigh, but his attention remained on the guards. The two closest had all attention focused on the newcomer as he explained something. Something Héctor couldn’t hear. Something that made the others raise browbones, widen eyes, and nod slowly in solemn understanding.

Something that made one cast a glance in his direction.

No. No, it couldn’t be him. He hadn’t _done_ anything yet. The bridge was still meters away, and he hadn’t done anything more than bundle up in an oversized dress and hat and give off a conceited air. They had no proof it was him beneath the disguise; and even if they did, there was nothing they could do until he reached the bridge itself. Until he actually committed a crime, the guards could only watch and suspect.

The line moved. The guards conferred among themselves, asking the newcomer a question to which he shook his head, drawing nods from the other two, before walking away.

Héctor relaxed slightly. If they didn’t need three guards for…whatever this was, then it couldn’t be too serious.

One guard straightened, hooked his thumbs on his belt, and started toward the line.

Héctor looked toward the bridge. He’d reach the front of the line in a few minutes, provided all went as it should. From there, he stood a chance of being turned away or dragged off—or of running straight across.

The guard locked eyes with him, turned back to his companion. They exchanged a few words, spared a few glances his direction, and moved toward him.

He was so close to the bridge. So close to his family. Just let a few more people go, get up to the desk, cause a scene. A scene that could very well end with him being dragged off to some office. But then, that had been a possibility from the very beginning. It had been the ending of each of his previous attempts; this one might simply end earlier than most.

They were closer now.

If they’d decided to move in on him before he even made it to the bridge, then he couldn’t be guilty of the same crime he committed every year.

Héctor cast a glance down the line. Not as long as it usually was around sunset, but if this were quickly resolved and he were able to get back in line, he’d spend a good portion of the next hour waiting.

The guards reached the line.

There _was_ always next year. Héctor could run now, spend the rest of the year planning out a better disguise, a better strategy, all the while pretending that the fine or the written warning—or whatever he was about to get—had taught him the error of his ways.

But that was a year away. Twenty-one years of separation would become twenty-two. Coco would in all likelihood be a mother now, and he still remembered her as a little girl barely old enough to sing along as he played for her.

Héctor stepped out of line, leaving a space that the woman behind him filled almost immediately. Good. That was good. It gave him time—a few seconds, maybe, but time nonetheless—to slip toward the next line over and duck through.

He didn’t run. Running would draw attention that he didn’t need. But he did quicken his step, resisting the urge to glance over his shoulder—but only barely.

******

Imelda’s hand was still bone.

She didn’t expect it to change, not without the blessing she needed. But she had seen it before. She ought to have become accustomed to it by now.

“I doubt it’s going to go away if you stare at it, Imelda.”

Imelda clenched her jaw, rather than her fist. The former was less noticeable. “Perdóname. I’m not used to seeing my own skeleton.”

“It’s less… _unnerving_ when you see it all at once.”

“I would imagine.” She turned her hand over. She could see more bones now; the curse crouched at the edge of her palm. Like Ernesto, it had no intention of leaving.

“How is your family these days?”

 _You’ve picked a fine time to start caring about that._ The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t let them free. The cubicle they’d placed her in—the one Ernesto had followed her to—was too small for arguments. She’d been told the border agents used it for breaks, though with only a couple of chairs and an old table, said breaks were likely neither lengthy nor comfortable. A few had been in and out, staying just long enough to catch their nonexistent breath. Perhaps they would have stayed longer had their little break room not been occupied by a living woman and a celebrity, but then, Día de los Muertos _was_ the busiest night of the year.

Still. Of the two people sitting in the break room, only one was obligated to be there.

“They’re fine.”

“Just ‘fine’?”

“Sí. Fine.” If he’d wanted to know about Coco and Julio, about little Victoria and her Tía Rosita and how the former already watched the goings-on in the workshop with wide inquisitive eyes, he wouldn’t have disappeared after that tour. If he cared about that information in the slightest, he would have taken pains to learn it long before that bell.

“Imelda….”

_“¿Que?”_

She hadn’t meant it to sound gentle, but it must have sounded harsher than that, if Ernesto’s slight jump was any indication. Superfluous as an apology was, she still needed to know how he came about Héctor’s songbook.

“I’m sorry.” She let it out as a sigh, touching calcified fingers to her aching temple. “I just….twenty-one years, Ernesto. Twenty-one years without so much as a _letter._ ”

He hesitated a long minute, looking at his hand resting on the table. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

 _How very noble of you._ “I would rather be upset than wonder.”

“Oh? And what would you have done, if I’d come to your door with news he’d run off?”

She entertained the thought. There would have been tears, certainly. Shouts. The same accusations that had run through her head for the past twenty-one years— _you knew this would happen, you knew he’d do this and you dragged him along anyway,_ you let him leave. His head might have borne a shoe-shaped bruise for the next several days at least.

“It’s not about what I _might_ have done,” she said, flattening a hand on the table. “You should have told me as soon as you knew.”

Ernesto’s jaw tightened. Imelda tried to anticipate what he might say, to prepare a barb in advance, but he finally sighed.

“You’re right.” He looked down at the table. “I should have told you he left.”

Of all the things she’d expected, an admission of guilt was not one of them. Even so, the admission did not erase the guilt.

“Sí,” she said with a sigh. “You should have.”

*****

Police had taken over the chase.

Héctor didn’t see it happen, but two guards had chased him and he’d heard four voices when he’d first ducked into the shadows of an overpass, pausing long enough to trade his billowing dress and floppy hat for his old mariachi suit. It was more noticeable than he would have liked, but if the officers were still looking for someone in a dress, the swap might buy him a few seconds.

But they _were_ after him; there was no denying that now. He took every turn he could find, down streets and alleyways, doubling back on his path only to take a sharp left, yet every time he dared a glance back, he saw blue hats bobbing through the crowd.

Maybe he should stop.

He’d talked his way out of trouble before—or at least, it seemed he did, having been let off with a warning rather than the night in a holding cell he’d been threatened with. But if the guards had picked him out of the line before he even reached the bridge, then this must be something he couldn’t talk his way out of.

Every attempt to figure out _what_ led to a dead end.

He glanced back. The blue hats were closer now; he quickened his pace, but the crowd between them thinned, and he could see them. Two officers, both hastening their step on their way to him.

_Run._

He could do it. Bolt through streets he knew like he knew the guitar, find a place to hide until they were distracted by more pressing matters.

_Run. Run._

And practically admit he had something to run from. He’d walked away, sure, but that wasn’t quite the same. A walk—even a quick and meandering one—could be excused more easily than a run.

And if he hid, if the worst happened and he became a fugitive, he’d throw away any chance he might ever have of crossing the bridge.

Héctor drew a long breath he didn’t need, stopped, and put on a smile.

“Buenas noches,” he said when the two men were within earshot. “How can I help you?”

*****

“You don’t have to stay with me, you know.”

She’d intended it as a dismissal, and if Ernesto took it as one, he didn’t show it. “I just…thought you might not want to be alone.”

 _Those words might have meant more twenty years ago._ Her throat practically ached with all the things she’d refused to say, and the only thing that kept her from loosing those words now was the knowledge that Ernesto’s mausoleum sat within easy walking distance of the family home. She could say all those things later, though hissing them at a marble bust would be far less satisfying than shouting them at the man himself. “You’re famous here. I don’t want to keep you from any sort of fiesta you’ve planned.”

Ernesto smiled. “I had no plans for the evening.”

“Your first Día de Muertos in the Land of the Dead and you have _nothing_ planned?” She returned his smile with one of her own, resisting a suspicious tone in favor of a more jocular one. “I would have thought _you_ of all people would have _at least_ a dozen places to be.”

He hesitated, and his smile changed, took on a shade of self-deprecation. “I _did_ consider playing a show, back in the Land of the Living.”

“Not here?”

“I was there, the audience was there, it seemed like a logical step.”

“What changed your mind?”

Something flashed through his eyes, too quickly for Imelda to categorize it, and he smiled again. “I realized after I arrived that I hadn’t brought my guitar.”

“That seems like an odd thing for a musician to forget.”

“Come now, Imelda.” He leaned forward, elbows resting on the table. “Don’t tell me _you’ve_ never left the house without the _only_ thing you needed.”

She had—on more than one occasion—but she wasn’t going to admit it to _him._ Not with that smug half-smile decorating his face. “Have you considered hiring an assistant?”

“Why? Do you want the job?”

She rolled her eyes before turning them back toward the door. No one had come through since a harried-looking young woman had stepped inside, taken one look at the pair of them, and backed out without a word. Imelda went through a short list of questions for the next one who entered. They would need to get back to work quickly, of course, but she would welcome even a short reprieve from the current company.

A few moments passed in silence. Several times she thought Ernesto might be close to breaking it, but the soft _ah_ or _oh_ remained the extent of his attempt at conversation.

She nearly jumped out of her chair when the door opened. Disappointment set in quickly when she saw it was only a border agent—but the agent’s smile brought hope bubbling to the surface again.

“Señora Rivera? Good news! We’ve found your family.”

“Gracias a Dios,” she breathed.

“That was fast,” Ernesto said.

Imelda was on her feet before she realized that the news could have come through a distant phone and whoever they had found might not arrive for some minutes or hours. “Where?”

“He’s right outside—ven, I’ll show you.”

“Who did you find?”

The question hadn’t occurred to Imelda; it would be a joyous reunion whether she had her Mamá or her Abuelita or Tía Erlina waiting for her. A short one, but joyous nonetheless. She couldn’t imagine why Ernesto would care, aside from idle curiosity, but the border agent smiled at her when she answered.

“Your husband, Señora. He’s waiting for you.”


	5. Part Five

_Your husband._

Héctor was there. Of all the people in Imelda’s family, of everyone they could have found and armed with knowledge of the situation, the Department of Family Reunions, in all their wisdom, had found Héctor.

Ernesto could see their reasoning. Imelda’s parents and primos and all the rest would have crossed the bridge by now. Photo agents would have been dispatched with pictures to guide them, but it would be a process, and a time-consuming one at that. Assuming they wanted the curse lifted as quickly as possible, of course they would seek out the one person in her family who had not crossed. And as the one person who had not crossed—now or ever—Héctor would naturally be the first at Imelda’s side by virtue of being closest.

It made sense. It all made perfect, logical sense. Ernesto would not have been able to argue with a single one of those points, had he been given the opportunity.  

Imelda stared for a long minute. No words. No sounds. Just silence as she blinked at the border agent.

_“Oh,”_ he imagined her saying. _“I…yes, I’ve suspected that for a while. That he’s dead. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”_

It made for a nice picture, but Ernesto knew even before she spoke that it was just that. A comforting image to be enjoyed only as long as it took Imelda to shred it.

“No.” She took a step back, shaking her head. “No, no. He’s not— _here._ I don’t know where he is, but he’s not—he didn’t—“

The border agent’s hand covered her mouth. “Lo siento, Señora, We—we thought you knew!”

“ _How_ could I know? I haven’t received so much as a _letter_ from that man in twenty-one years, and now you tell me he’s _dead_?”  

She had both hands braced on the table, drawing long, ragged breaths. For the moment, all her attention, all her anger, seemed to have chosen the border agent as a target. Unfortunately, the door was behind them both; Ernesto couldn’t leave without drawing their attention. 

And Héctor’s. 

“He’s your husband, Señora, we assumed—“

“ _Was_ my husband.” She was back to snapping now. “That ended when he left.”

“I—I didn’t know, none of us knew! We were only trying to send you home.”

Ernesto had watched the encroachment of a monzón, tracked its approach in increments as stone-grey clouds swallowed up blue skies. He had witnessed it over the course of hours, wondering if it would interfere with his show. The first clap of thunder, so strong and close he felt it in his stomach; the wind bowing the brush and trees and sending sprays of water thrashing against the building, hammering against the walls, had sent thoughts of his show to the back of his mind.  

Watching Imelda try to steady her breathing, her hands slowly tightening on the table’s edge, was like watching a monzón swoop in faster than any storm had a right to move—and there was no shelter in sight.  

“You.”

Her eyes locked on his. That first thunderclap sounded right over his head; had he been standing, he might have collapsed.

“Why did you not tell me?”

Her voice wasn’t low, but she had not yet raised it, every word pronounced. “I—Imelda, I didn’t know.”

Perhaps she saw the lie in those words, perhaps she didn’t, but she saw the songbook. Saw it in his hands, among his effects. She saw Héctor hunched over it, writing a new song, tucking it into his suitcase, knowing he wouldn’t have parted with it easily.

He hadn’t parted with it easily.

“He left in México City,” Ernesto went on, concealing a wince. Surely Héctor wouldn’t be close enough to hear the entire conversation, but he kept his voice as low as he could without drawing suspicion. 

“And you never heard from him again?”

“No.” 

“You. His _brother._ He never spoke to you again.”

A small, muffled squeak came from the border agent. Whether it was fear or wisdom that kept her from asking one of the obvious questions, she held her silence.

“You were his wife. He never wrote _you_ , either.”

Pain creased her features for a split-second before that patient sort of anger resumed its place.  

“I thought he would have told you, of all people, where he was going.”

“So did I.”

Her jaw clenched and unclenched.

“I don’t know why he did it, Imelda.” He softened his tone. Sometimes that calmed her, sometimes it didn’t, though only Héctor had ever tried. “He left me, too.”

“ _You_ clearly came out of that calamity none the worse for wear.”

She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen him in the days and weeks following Héctor’s death, let alone the death itself. Hadn’t seen him performing Héctor’s songs alone on the guitar she’d given him. Hadn’t seen him smiling at the adoration of the crowds. The remark was a jab at his success, not its catalyst. “It…wasn’t easy.”

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t.”

Scornful sarcasm—another one of Imelda’s more charming traits. But that was all it was. A weapon she used in situations like this, where she fought to gain the upper hand by any means necessary. She knew no more than what the border agent had revealed. Any detail beyond that was just guessing.

“Should—should I….?” The border agent began, but Ernesto barely heard her.

“You can’t think I _wanted_ him to leave.”

She flattened both palms on the table. “And how long did you wait after he did? One day? One week before you ran off to—to—charm the world with your—your _music_?”  

She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. The way she’d said _your music_ was evidence enough that the truth still remained far from her comprehension, and yet the way she spoke, the things she said….

No. She didn’t know. _Héctor_ didn’t know. 

“You think I _should_ have waited?” He was on his feet now, and it took everything within him to keep from raising his voice. “You think I should have sat around doing _nothing_ after my _best friend_ walked out the door without warning?”

“You could have taken the time to write a _letter_.”

“Ay, we’re going back to _that_ again.” The dead should not have been capable of getting headaches, but he felt one forming regardless. A side effect of Imelda’s presence.  

“Fine. We can talk about why he left his suitcase behind.”

The suitcase. The songbook. That was what she meant; she didn’t care about Héctor’s clothes so much as the thing he’d died for.

The thing he’d left behind prior to his death. That was what she believed. He had to remember that.

“I told you, Imelda, I don’t _know_ why he did what he did.”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“Don’t give me that. I’ve told you all I know.”

Yet she had not shared all _she_ knew. The realization crept over him like a chill. She knew who had originally owned the songbook, knew who had written the songs—and yet she’d kept that bit of knowledge away from clerks and border agents alike. With a single statement she could begin the unraveling of his reputation, but that statement remained unspoken. 

And if he knew Imelda, it was not benevolence that kept her from saying all she could.  

Her eyes locked on his, and he read the message in them as clearly as if it were printed. _Tell me about the songbook,_ it said. _Tell me, or_ I’ll _tell_ them _._

“Señorita.”

The border agent’s attention snapped toward him.

If Imelda wanted to go home, it was time she did so. “Perhaps you should find another one of Imelda’s family to give their blessing.”

Imelda’s gaze hardened into a glare, lips pressed together, eyes threatening to burn through his skull. _No need for a tantrum,_ he wanted to say. _I’m helping you get what you want. You see?_

“Unless she’d rather take the blessing from her husband?”

“I….” The border agent looked from him to Imelda and back, seemingly remembered how to speak, and drew a breath. “I’ll ask my supervisor. Or…whoever’s outside. I mean the police. Or…someone. Un momento.”

She practically lunged for the door, but stopped with her hand on the doorknob when she saw Imelda was right behind.

“I—you should stay here, Señora.”

“Why?”

It was less a question than a challenge, and the border agent considered it only a moment before opening the door wide and letting Imelda precede her through.

Ernesto sank into the nearest chair, cursing his limbs as they shook. He had no reason to fear. Imelda had, from all appearances, pushed her husband’s memory to the back of her mind. If his sources were to be believed, she had never put his photo on her ofrenda. Never asked what became of him, never suspected anything but a sudden loss of interest in her.

Now she knew.

She wouldn’t ask. She wanted, more than anything, to go home before the curse overtook her. Any questions as to her husband’s demise would be secondary to that or, more likely, pondered only once she was safe at home and away from the only two men with knowledge of what had happened that night. Decades could pass between her return to the Land of the Living and her death—time enough for any nagging questions to fade.

But if she _did_ ask them now….

Ernesto wanted to race out of that pitiful little cubicle. He wanted to snatch Imelda by the wrist and drag her off to the Department of Family Reunions, push her into a chair, and watch her like a hawk until someone else— _anyone_ else—walked in with cempasúchil in hand and blessing in mind.

But that would only encourage further questions when she returned—and he couldn’t leave the cubicle while Héctor waited outside.

*******

_Your wife is here._

At those words, Héctor expected the worst. Imelda was still young, after all; death at forty-three wasn’t unheard of, but it was still too soon. It would have to be an accident that brought her here, though he couldn’t imagine what and didn’t want to try. But after walking with the officers for a few minutes, he finally worked up the courage to ask. Better to know and prepare than to be knocked off his feet by the revelation.

“Got herself cursed,” one of the officers said. “Needs a family blessing to send her back.”

“Wait.” He stopped in his tracks. “Wait wait wait wait wait. You mean…she’s _still alive_?”

He didn’t expect the faint smile on the officer’s face, but he didn’t dislike it, either. “Sí, Señor Rivera. She’s still alive.”

It was all Héctor could do to keep from running back to the bridge.

Back to _Imelda._

What he’d say would depend on what _she_ said first. That was the important thing—let her explain what had happened to the family portrait that made it unsuitable for an ofrenda, explain why she’d let Ernesto play his songs on the guitar she’d given him at their wedding, and then he could speak.

_I’m sorry. I never should have left._

That needed to be said the most; he’d say it first.

_I’ve missed you._

Maybe self-evident, but it still needed to be said—a hundred times over, if that’s what it took.

_How’s Coco?_

Thinking of that question erased all others. Asking it would raise fifty more, but he couldn’t know which ones until Imelda answered the first. He’d imagined the answers more times than he could count, tried not to and done it again. Was she married? If so, to who? Did she have children?

What had she been doing for the past twenty years?

What was she like?

Héctor tried to push those questions to the back of his mind, but this time they refused, perhaps knowing the answers were only as far as he was from Imelda. From his wife. She was there, and she was waiting—to go home, but not before he had his chance to see her. To speak to her. To hear her voice, laugh with her, cry with her, snatch all the bits of news she threw his way. To remember the things he feared he’d forgotten.

“Wait just a minute,” a smiling border agent said when the officers told her who they were and who was with them. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

She stepped into a small outbuilding, closed the door behind her.

He was close, but the murmur and babble of a hundred conversations surrounded him. He didn’t hear the border agent announce his presence. For a long minute, he didn’t hear anything.

_“Lo siento, Señora, We—we thought you knew!”_

“How _could I know? I haven’t received so much as a_ letter _from that man in twenty-one years, and now you tell me he’s_ dead?”  

Héctor instinctively took a step back, tried to sit down and realized there was nothing to sink into. No…she knew. She had to know. Ernesto would have told her.

_“He’s your husband, Señora, we assumed—“_

He would have gone straight to Santa Cecilia, Héctor’s guitar and suitcase seated beside him on the train. Imelda wouldn’t have known to greet him at the station, but Ernesto knew the way to their home as well as he knew his own name. Imelda would have guessed what happened the moment she saw his face.

_“_ Was _my husband. That ended when he left.”_

_Was my husband._

Héctor stumbled back, only dimly aware of hands on his shoulders, steadying him before a fall. The rest of what was said in that cubicle became a babble. He heard Imelda’s voice sniping back and forth with another, familiar voice, but whose it was escaped him.

_Was._

“Let’s find you a place to sit down.”

He nodded, let them half-lead, half-carry him to a spot behind the arrivals booth, waited as one officer snagged a chair and set it out, and sank into it the moment he could.

_Was my husband._

“This’ll pass,” one of the officers said. “Probably just mad she got herself cursed, is all.”

Héctor didn’t have the energy to correct him. He could only sit slumped in the chair, watching others carry offerings back into the city. The angry sniping of Imelda’s conversation had been replaced with happy chatter—more pleasant to listen to, but nowhere near soothing.

_That ended the moment he left._

He’d sent letters—scores of them, writing every moment he could spare. Songs for Coco. Stories for Imelda. She hadn’t sent any back, of course; to receive a letter, you needed to stay in the same place long enough to retrieve it from the post office. But he’d never imagined she wouldn’t want to. He’d pictured her writing letters she’d never be able to send, saving them for when he returned. They’d sit by the fire and read them together, laughing and smiling and nodding somberly at all the joy and sorrow he’d missed out on the road.

Héctor bowed his head. He might not have moved for the rest of the night, had he not felt someone watching him.

Imelda.

A glint of white marred her right hand—exposed bone; the officers had mentioned something about a curse—but it was the rest of her that held his attention. He hadn’t realized how accustomed he’d become to smiling skulls and exposed bone until that moment, when she stood there like a memory come to life. Older, yes, but no less familiar—and even more beautiful than he remembered. A leather work apron covered a dress made in the same style she tended to favor. What it was for, he couldn’t guess, but he couldn’t imagine it as the mark of a struggling endeavor. Everything she’d done, no matter how small, had succeeded. She’d sat beside him for all the hours she could spare, learning the language of music simply to learn it. Whatever she’d put her mind to this time, she’d have done it better than most.

_I’m sorry._

His thoughts had become a briar, and that was the only thing he could pluck out. No explanations. No justifications. Just an apology. If it was the only thing she let him say, he’d rather say just that.

Only a few meters stood between them, but it was enough to make her expression difficult to read. Anger, remorse, satisfaction grim or otherwise—Héctor could only guess.

_I’m sorry, Imelda. I’m so sorry._

He could say it. Close the gap in a few quick steps, speak before she had a chance to turn away. Maybe it would keep here there. Give him a chance to explain.

_The moment he left._

Without warning, without a signal, Imelda turned and walked toward the station. Héctor wouldn’t have followed even if he could bring himself to stand. He simply watched until his wife disappeared into a crowd that continually paused to gawk.

He didn’t know how long he stayed, how long he watched families return from or prepare for visits. The officers conferred between each other; one left and the other remained at his side. He replayed what he’d heard again and again. Nothing improved, nothing changed. Just Imelda’s voice, and words he hadn’t expected.

Maybe he should have expected them. Known they were what he’d get.

Somewhere along the repetitions, Imelda’s voice stepped aside just enough for another to join it. Not the border agent’s; the male voice he’d heard, arguments he couldn’t quite make out. A familiar voice, familiarity drowned out by the things Imelda had said.

She’d been arguing with Ernesto.  


	6. Part Six

Imelda nearly ran to the station. There was no reason for her to go, none she had in mind, but it was close and therefore the first destination her mind settled on after realizing she had to _go, move, get away._

Héctor was dead.

For years she’d pictured him in the arms, in the home, of another woman—one as naïve as she was wealthy, taken in by his glowing accounts of a mother he seemed to adore, scattered fragments of a father he barely remembered. _“Oh,_ Héctor _,”_ the woman would breathe, leaning toward him as he plucked a few notes on the costly skull guitar. _“I had no idea.”_

_“Now you know.”_ He’d smile—sad and sweet and just wistful enough to cut to the quick.

Now that image had been pushed aside by that of a skeleton in a worn mariachi suit, elbows resting on his knees as he stared at her in silence.

She slammed the double doors open and strode through. The dead parted for her, eyes bulging and jaws dropping, but she hardly noticed. She could only see Héctor. Twenty-one years of putting him out of her mind and now he was there to stay.

He’d looked so young.

Imelda stopped, did a slow turn on the tile floor. The station was so much _bigger_ than she remembered, and it had seemed enormous when she entered with Almarza at her side. She could get lost in the entryway alone, to say nothing of the halls and staircases and doors leading to offices and more corridors.

She needed to do something.

She’d stormed out of that cubicle and walked all the way to the station with no one’s permission. They would ask, and she would need to give them an answer besides _I saw my former husband and ran._

The photos. Almarza’s notes. The dead had paperwork for Día de los Muertos. They’d have it for the rest of the year. The first counter she saw might not have been the correct one, but Imelda slammed her fist against it anyway.

“You have paperwork for when someone dies.”

She didn’t know for certain that they did. It was a guess—an educated one, but still a guess. Years of business experience had taught her that questions were an invitation for a _no._ Statements weren’t a guarantee of a _yes,_ but they were more likely to earn one.

The clerk drew back as though Imelda had brandished her shoe. “I—ah—sí, Señora. But not here.”

“Where?”

“I—“

She pounded a fist against the counter again. “Tell me where!”

“Up—upstairs. Entry Records. Third floor. But—”

She marched up the first flight of stairs she saw, reaching the third floor without trouble, and glanced both ways for a sign, for anything to point her in the right direction.

It was difficult to say how old the clerk had been at her death. Perhaps the dead, who saw one another on the daily, could more easily determine age from looks, but Imelda had only a guess that could’ve been off by three years or three decades, and likely erred on the younger side. The clerk could be anywhere between twenty and fifty and Imelda would be none the wiser until she asked.

She turned left down the hallway, spotted a sign some meters down. Entry Records was in the opposite direction. She turned on her heel and stormed that way instead.

Héctor couldn’t have been as young as he looked. She remembered a young man, and so a young man was what she’d seen imposed over the skeleton gazing sorrowfully from across the way. Thirty. That was his most likely age at death. Twenty-eight at the youngest. There was no reason he shouldn’t have lived to thirty after he left.

She nearly passed the door with _Entry Records_ printed on its window. Flinging it open, she saw a small entryway and a large desk with a wide space filled with filing cabinets beyond. The clerk’s head snapped up, regarding her with wide eyes.

“I need the paperwork for Héctor Rivera.”

Whether it was the look on her face or the fact a living woman wore it, she wasn’t sure, but the resulting shock was the same. “Perdóname, Señora, I can only give that out to government officials or to family.”

She pounded her fist on his desk. “ _Familia?_ I was _married_ to that man, and if you don’t think that is _family,_ then—“

“I’m sorry! I—I just—what’s your name?”

“Imelda Rivera.”  

“Year of birth?”

It seemed they were getting somewhere, but she knew it could be a ruse to keep her sated until a supervisor arrived. “1899.”

“And where are you from?”

“Santa Cecilia, Oaxaca.”

“And is his hometown the same? Santa Cecilia?”

“It is.”

“Un—un momento.” The clerk ducked through the doorway behind the desk; she saw him retreat into one row of filing cabinets before disappearing into another. Metal wheels rolled against tracks; a drawer slammed closed and another opened. She heard the soft _thump_ of a stack of papers hitting the floor, but when the clerk emerged, he was empty-handed.

“When did he die?”

“Do you think I would be here if I knew that?”  

The clerk drew a breath. “When was he born?”

“November 30, 1900.”  

With a quick, nervous nod, the clerk disappeared again.

She didn’t need to see Héctor’s paperwork.

He’d left of his own volition. He’d walked out that door and he’d chosen not to return. The precise date of his death changed nothing about the past twenty-one years. It didn’t erase the long days Coco spent gazing out the window in search of her Papá, or the months of having little more than plain tortillas while she fought to get the zapataría off the ground, or the whispers, the things they didn’t bother keeping to whispers, _“We’ve heard you had some sharp words for him the day he left….”_

There was a deep _thump_ as the clerk dropped a stack of folders on the desk.

“If you expect _me_ to sort through those—“

“No! No no no, Señora! I—there are many Riveras, and it’s easier to look through them here.”  The clerk flipped open the first folder, glanced down, closed it and moved onto the next.

Imelda began to pace. Thirty, more likely thirty-five. She remembered a young man and she would have seen a young man no matter what Héctor looked like. He could have been the same age as she and her mind would have shown her the youth who had abandoned his family.

She looked to the door. There would be people looking for her—people she wanted to find. People who could send her home. She’d return without answers, but she’d still return before the night was out. And now that she had a moment to consider, perhaps answers weren’t important after all. She’d lived without them for twenty-one years; another twenty or thirty wouldn’t be insufferable.  

“Did the two of you have a daughter?”

Her stomach did a flip. “Socorro.”

“Year of birth?”

“1918.”

The clerk lifted a sheet of paper from a folder, turned it around and slid it toward her. “Héctor Rivera. Born November 30, 1900 in Santa Cecilia, wife Imelda, daughter Socorro.”

Imelda took the sheet. She found herself leaning against the desk, heart hammering in her ears, as she skimmed past what she already knew, down to the field labeled _Date of Death._

December 7, 1921. The same year he’d left. She read it twice, three, four times, but the one did not show itself to be a poorly inked seven, and the two never even remotely resembled a three.

“This can’t be right.”

“I’m sorry?”  

She turned the sheet so the clerk could read. “Here—see? 1921. He died in 1921?”

“Sí.”

A trembling set in, radiating from her core out to her hands. She clenched her calcified fist in a vain attempt to stop the shaking. “But….no. That’s not right.”  

“Our agents are careful to record the correct date at all times, Señora. It’s important that our records show accurate information.”

“It’s not right.”

“I’m afraid that’s what it says.”

Imelda drew one breath and then another, but she couldn’t ease the trembling. “How often does your department record the wrong date?”

“It’s very rare. The date is the first thing any agent fills out. They stamp it, you see? So there’s little chance of them writing the wrong day or year by mistake. At the most, they might forget to change the day, or stamp 1940 instead of 1941 or 1939.”

“Was it that way in 1921?”

“It has been that way for as long as I’ve done entry paperwork, Señora.”

Imelda nearly asked how long that had been, but knew the government’s fondness for paperwork likely predated Héctor’s life—and her life—by at least three centuries.

She turned, resting her back against the desk as she read through the paper again. _Food poisoning_ was listed as the _Cause of Death,_ but she couldn’t focus on it or anything else for long. There had to be something there, some other discrepancy proving the lie stamped beside _Date of Death._ A name that wasn’t hers listed as his wife. A hometown other than Santa Cecilia. She would have grabbed hold of a misplaced comma and used it to build a case, but there was nothing. Just information she couldn’t absorb, no matter how clear it was on the page.

Héctor had walked out of his home and been swallowed up by the city. One taste of the world and Santa Cecilia, his family and everyone in that town, had lost all the charm he’d claimed to adore. He’d stayed in that wide world awhile, seizing every moment that came his way, tasting all the poisoned fruit it had to offer. He hadn’t died a week after his twenty-first birthday, and she hadn’t seen him earlier. He hadn’t been brought to her as a candidate to send her home, and she wasn’t reading his paperwork now. For some reason surpassing her comprehension, she had become the victim of an elaborate joke.  

“¿E…estás bien, Señora?”

Imelda glanced up sharply. Concern covered the clerk’s face. Her eyes stung; a hand to her cheek brushed away tears, the bone oddly cool against her skin.

Crying. After all these years, all the success in her wake, all the distance she’d placed between herself and that walkaway musíco, here she was weeping like a child. 

She straightened, slapped the sheet of paper back on the desk, and strode out the door. Twenty-one years the question had crouched at the back of her mind—of where his path had led, once he walked out that door. She’d settled for the obvious answer, the only one she could think of, and it had scraped at her every time she heard music, each time she allowed her mind to stray in Héctor’s direction. A love too good to be true had become exactly that.

Imelda headed down the hall at a brisk pace, took the first staircase she saw to ground level. She had her answer. She had _certainty._ Héctor had left home and died some months later. He’d wandered away from his best friend, his suitcase, everything he had, in the dead of night and succumbed to food poisoning shortly after. The letters had stopped in mid-November, if her memory served; he would’ve been dead within a matter of weeks after wandering off.

It was _wrong._ Despite all the clerk had said, the whole story was wrong, like a boot with the heel attached to the toe. The details fit together, they formed a coherent picture, but it was like something out of a fever dream—the sort you wanted to forget immediately upon waking.

She brushed through a corridor, sighted the atrium ahead, and quickened her pace. There would be someone from the government there, or on their way; she’d caused enough of a stir on her way in that she wouldn’t be difficult to locate. They’d have someplace to wait for her family, for their blessing.

Even if the guitar meant nothing to him, even if the songs had become nothing more than sweet words to make the women swoon, Héctor would have taken them both to play for tips.

Imelda halted midstep. Of all the details that had been handed to her since the curse took effect, that was the first that made any immediate sense. Héctor wasn’t stupid. He was many things—a liar, a daydreamer, a terminal romantic too passionate for his own good—but an idiot was not one of them. Given the choice between scrambling for odd jobs and the surety of earning a few pesos playing for passersby, he would have taken the sensible option.

“Señora Rivera!”

Imelda paused. There was Almarza, or another photo agent or border agent or some other occupation she couldn’t name, ready to take her back to wait for her family.

Or to inform her they’d already been found.

Julio would be out of his mind with worry. Rosita would be wringing her hands, Óscar and Felipe would be tearing the house apart looking in places she couldn’t possibly fit, or running around town chasing possibilities that would have only been plausible had they been the ones to vanish. And Coco….

Years had passed before she stopped watching out the window or casting long looks down the road. Years had passed since she cried herself to sleep. Imelda had a sneaking suspicion her daughter had never truly stopped, but merely learned to do it more covertly.

For a moment, Imelda saw Coco, not the little girl she’d been but the woman she was, gazing out the window for a familiar figure, a cloud of dust down the road—any signal that her mother was coming home—turning away only when Victoria needed her more than she needed news, even bad news.

Then she saw Héctor, rising in the dead of night to wander off down the road, without a thing to his name. No clothes, no songbook, no guitar, no explanation for the unexplainable. She tried to match that image to the man she’d married, but she might as well have compared two different men.

A living woman in the Land of the Dead wouldn’t be difficult to find. That would serve her well when she was ready to return home, but for now she would need a way around that.

Imelda resumed walking, setting the same brisk pace as before. The voice called her name again, and she weaved through the crowd, ducking her head and praying she wouldn’t be seen.

For better or worse, she needed answers. One conversation. An hour at most, and she’d have them.

******

Héctor hadn’t realized a mansion could be built so fast, but from where he stood, construction seemed to be coming along nicely. Not that where he stood made much difference. It wasn’t visible from every window in the city, but Héctor never had trouble sighting it, whether he stood in Shantytown or one of the rehearsal studios across the way. No matter where he looked, those gaudy white walls were visible out the corner of his eye, and the space between the bridge and the station was no exception.

_“Stay close,”_ was all the officer had said, when Héctor finally found the will to stand. _“Just in case.”_ He’d had little trouble obeying that command; despite the sympathy he’d get from some, he didn’t have the heart to return to the shanties just yet, and with Imelda having gone off toward the station, he couldn’t bring himself to stray too far from her.

But then, there was Ernesto.

His amigo could still be in that cubicle, but chances were good he’d left for his mansion some minutes before. Gone off to supervise construction or while away the holiday in that unfinished palace of his, maybe replay his argument with Imelda.

Imelda, alive in the Land of the Dead, arguing with Ernesto. The whole scenario brought up so many questions Héctor couldn’t verbalize them all. But there was one he could verbalize, one he’d asked since his first attempt to contact his amigo ended with an arm twisted painfully out of socket by those guards.

_Why?_

Somehow, it summed up everything he needed to say. _Why won’t you talk to me? Why the guards, Ernesto? Why didn’t you tell anyone I wrote your songs? Why were you talking to Imelda?_

_Why didn’t you tell her I died?_

As much as he wanted an answer, as much as he might imagine finding one at that mansion, he knew he wouldn’t be allowed within two meters of that place. Maybe he could sneak past, somehow, but Imelda’s words rang through his head and he couldn’t think too far past them.

_That ended the moment he left._

He’d promised to return. Promised to come home the first time he’d brought it up, and the second, and the third. It hadn’t become a refrain so much as a final note, something he’d say in an attempt to end each ensuing argument or angry silence on her part. And he’d planned to keep it, too, if only because he hadn’t seen a reason why he wouldn’t.

_“Imelda, why do you fret so much? I’ll come back.”_

He’d smiled.

He’d _laughed._

He’d done it. Stupid accident or no, he’d done it. He’d walked out that door and never returned. Done the one thing he’d sworn never to do, even before courting Imelda. It was a wonder she hadn’t struck him on sight, rather than simply walking away.

She deserved an apology.

It wouldn’t make up for anything. Wouldn’t erase the fights he’d brushed off and the damage he hadn’t lingered to see. But she still deserved to hear it, whether or not she accepted it. A simple apology wouldn’t be enough, but it was all he had.

Héctor turned from the distant, unfinished mansion and set off toward the station.


	7. Part Seven

The authorities would likely have questions. Ernesto didn’t know what form those questions would take, but since Imelda had come dangerously close to spilling his every secret before flouncing out, he knew he would like them even less than they’d like the answers.

There was a chance, of course, that he could steer the conversation in a more favorable direction. Cause the police to turn their attention from him and onto Imelda or—better yet—Héctor. But the things she’d so casually brought out to aid her in their argument still stormed through his head, and he needed time to get his thoughts in order.

The air outside the cubicle was only slightly cooler than the air within it, but far less stifling. Perhaps that was due to its size, but more likely to Imelda’s presence. Her anger had a way of filling a room, heating the air and making you long for the peace and sanity of a drunken brawl.

Dios mio, how had Héctor _lived_ with that woman?

He glanced to one side, then to the other, making the movement appear far more nonchalant than he felt. Lines of dead stretched out on either side; those for Departures had thinned somewhat, but only in a relative sense. He had stayed in cities, performed for crowds, and the sheer number of _people_ in the Land of the Dead still left him reeling. Were he anyone else, he perhaps could have melted into the crowd and left for his mansion without causing a stir.

The last time he’d wanted to escape notice, he’d just watched Héctor hit the cobblestone face-first.

His instincts screamed for him to walk straight past the same border agent who had sent Imelda into a fury, but that woman had stirred enough suspicion around him already. He didn’t need to add another incident.

“Perdón,” he said, and the suited man’s attention snapped toward him. He offered an apologetic smile. “You wouldn’t haven seen where la Señora Rivera went, would you?”

“She went to the station,” the man said, casting a glare at the border agent. “And we’re lucky she didn’t slip our notice entirely, considering we just _let her walk_ out the door.”

Ernesto had not yet accustomed himself to all the peculiarities of death and the Land of the Dead, but his ability to spot an attractive face had required surprisingly little adjustment. Seeing the border agent’s face downcast and anxious drew Ernesto’s mouth into a reassuring smile.

“No te preocupes,” he said. “She could be rather…”

“Intimidating?” the border agent offered.

“I was going to say ‘slightly less pleasant than a cholla on her good days,’ but that’ll do.”  

The border agent smiled, snorted a laugh, but her supervisor—or _the_ supervisor, or someone in charge—gave him a flat look.

“You didn’t happen to learn anything about that curse while you spoke to her, did you?”

“Unfortunately, no. I doubt she knows any more than I do.”

For long seconds, Ernesto thought the supervisor might pick at those words with more questions. _What did you talk about? We figured you knew_ her _, you didn’t say anything about her husband. You spent all that time with her and didn’t manage to find out what could help send her home?_ But before he could think of a passable answer to any of those unspoken questions, the supervisor sighed and turned away.

Ernesto wanted to leave right then, but he still had to feign calm, so he gave the border agent another smile and a wink before turning to go.

The station. Ernesto had little idea what, exactly, went on at that place, or any number of other places across the city. He’d appeared there at the moment of his death, and spent a while—he wasn’t sure how long and wasn’t inclined to ask—lying unconscious as his bones knit themselves back together, repairing the myriad breaks and fractures that bell had graciously gifted to him. Following that introduction to the Arrivals area, he wasn’t keen on returning unless he had no choice.

If there was something at the station that would lead her toward the truth, Imelda would have gone in search of it.

The thought made Ernesto want to run for the station and drag her back to the bridge, force her to stay put until one of those photo agents finally did the job they were paid to do. But even if such a plan wouldn’t raise every alarm in the mind of every agent and clerk and police officer in the Land of the Dead, he knew it would backfire once Imelda was brought into the equation. Dragging her back would only entice her to flee again. Pulling her away from whatever information she’d gone to find would only cause her to redouble her efforts to find it.  

There was a chance, of course, that whatever the Department of Family Reunions had regarding Héctor’s death would be withheld from her. Knowing Imelda, she would demand it be given to her anyway, but if all her efforts ended at a stone wall or a dead end, Ernesto would need only to ensure she made it back to the Land of the Living before sunrise.  

But if not….

His driver had been instructed to wait near the station when he’d first left to retrieve his guitar. With no reason to leave the curb or the vehicle itself, he would have remained at his post long past the expected time of return—all night, if needed. Sure enough, the vehicle waited precisely where he’d left it. An older model, still absent the coat of white paint he thought it needed, but the sight was still unusual enough that passersby slowed their pace or stopped altogether to gawk. Ernesto spared them a wave and a smile as he climbed in.

His driver was a man named Alonzo, dead five years prior to the bell incident, though he’d been a fan since 1934. Some employers might not have considered that information relevant, but Ernesto thought it might be useful to remember.

“Anything to report?” Ernesto asked as Alonzo pulled away from the curb.

“Aside from the usual gawkers and a few niños who wanted to see the inside?” Alonzo shook his head. “Everyone’s eager to get to the bridge.”

Or from it, Ernesto thought as the limo crept down the street. Automobiles were far more common than they were in places like Santa Cecilia, but still enough of a rarity that Alonzo needed to negotiate more foot traffic than anything else.

“Isn’t there a side street you can take?”

“Gotta get off this street first.”

Ernesto gazed out the window, watching a succession of faces pass slowly enough for him to make out skull markings. “I might as well have walked,” he muttered.

Alonzo wasn’t paid to argue.

True to his word, they made better progress upon exiting the street nearest the bridge, and were soon moving along at a more reasonable pace. Not as rapid as Ernesto would have liked, but the streets were narrow, the turns were sharp, and wrecking the limousine would have slowed their progress even more. Soon, but not soon enough, the limo was parked and he took the walkway up to his mansion.

Upon arrival, he’d found no shortage of men willing to design and build a home catered to his specifications. An ivory tower, stretching up to the sky, drawing every eye in the city like a beacon. It would be a massive undertaking— _had_ been a massive undertaking—but he’d been assured that things were coming along far more quickly than they might have for similar projects.

None of that made the sight of gaping holes where walls should have been, of paint cans and tarpaulins and tools left on bare floors, any less aggravating.

But this was no time to complain about paid carpenters and masons wheedling their way into a holiday off. The trip from the bridge had consumed enough time already, and he knew where Raúl would be.

A clatter of claws on tile floors sounded around the corner. Despite it all, despite Imelda and Héctor and the mess waiting just outside his walls, Ernesto found himself smiling.

In seconds, his alebrijes were dancing at his feet, pawing at his ankles and standing on hind legs in a bid for attention. He was already on the floor when Raúl entered moments later.

To Ernesto’s knowledge, Raúl had never been more than a casual fan. Not the sort who dreamed of going to every show, who bought two of every record (one for playing, one for collecting) and treasured every scrap of news. He’d enjoyed the music, but from what Ernesto had gathered, he had never seen the man behind it as anything more than that.

He hadn’t learned about Héctor. No one had been privileged to hear that secret, not even his alebrijes. Yet when Héctor had first arrived at the mansion looking for time to talk, Raúl had been the first to recognize impending disaster and lead the rest of Ernesto’s recently hired security team to react with enough force to teach even the densest man or woman an unforgettable lesson. 

Héctor had not returned, or if he had, he had done it and kept his distance. And since then, without any sort of compensation or instruction, Raúl had been the one to gather rumors and report them back to his employer. No further questions. No attempts to learn more than he’d already gathered. Héctor was trouble and must be kept at bay. That was all he needed.

“No guitar?”

“No.”

Raúl moved forward and sat on the floor as well. “Rivera hasn’t shown his face since you left.”

“I nearly ran into him at the bridge.”

“He didn’t cross this year, did he?”

Ernesto sighed. Perhaps the story would make sense with some of the relevant details removed; perhaps it wouldn’t. “You heard of the living woman who was cursed?”

“I have now.”

“She’s Héctor’s wife. Or was, rather. She didn’t know she’d been a widow until tonight.”  

If that bit of information nudged Raúl closer to the truth behind them, he showed no surprise. No judgment, either. “And she has questions.”

“Sí,” Ernesto said, remembering her anger—held in reserve only for lack of information. “She has questions.”

“And I assume she can’t go home.”

“Not without a blessing.” An alebrije nudged her way underneath Ernesto’s arm, climbing onto his lap and drawing a small smile. “They _believe_ a family blessing might do it, but no one is certain.”

Raúl scratched another alebrije behind the ears as he mulled that over. “It sounds to me like sending her home is the best solution. Get those questions away from you.”

“Not if she finds answers at the station.”

“Is that where she went?”

Ernesto nodded. Raúl seemed to prefer to keep his thoughts close, and Ernesto could not immediately deduce anything from that guarded expression.

“She won’t live forever, Señor de la Cruz.”

He knew that. Everyone died, some sooner and others later. Sending Imelda back would remove her from the immediate vicinity of those questions she’d gone off to answer; she might find different, less conclusive answers in the Land of the Living, but within a few years or a few decades, she would be back among the dead—and she would bring those questions with her. But the longer she stayed here, the greater the risk she’d learn the whole truth.

And Imelda would not keep such an incendiary secret to herself. She’d burn his entire legacy to the ground with a smile on her face.

For a moment, just a moment, he had a vision of her storming up to the station, songbook in hand and Héctor in tow. _“This book,”_ she would say, _“belonged to my husband, who wrote Ernesto de la Cruz’s songs. Yet he was never credited for them. Would you like to know why?”_

They might not believe her at first, but she wouldn’t leave until they did. Once she was there, she would make herself heard—and she would do it until they listened.

“You’ve spent more time at the shanties than I have,” Ernesto said.

Raúl nodded. It had never officially become part of his duties, but he’d taken it upon himself when he’d learned where Héctor lived.

“Does he ever talk about his wife?”

He gave a small, amused smile. “Often enough that a few no longer speak to him.”  

Ernesto lifted the alebrije and stood, walking toward one of the unfinished areas of the mansion. The work had stopped halfway through a corridor, and the only lights that functioned were those at the mouth of the hallway. He could make out shapes—a long flat something that might have been a saw, a round something that resembled a paint can.

Killing Héctor had begun as an idea, a thought that took root somewhere between a particularly vicious quarrel and yet another morning spent watching him write what had to be his hundredth letter home, listening to him grumble. He hadn’t acted on it immediately. The idea had needed testing—first, through rumination on the act itself; then, through consideration of the particulars.

The idea forming in his head at that moment was no different.

“Do you think they would call him…obsessed?”

He turned, and saw Raúl frown in thought. “If the right circumstances came along. His wife, here in the Land of the Dead? Most people would kill for an opportunity like that.”

Ernesto nodded, turning back to the darkened corridor. He’d heard Héctor moan about how _If only Imelda were here, I’d do anything to have her here with me for just a minute_ more times than he could count. There was precedent. 

“Of course,” Raúl went on, “once she’s dead, she’s here to stay.”

“Here, yes. Not necessarily where she’ll be found.”

Raúl nodded slowly, thoughtfully. He clearly knew of some places that fit the bill. “And if the police ask him where she is?”

There was a chance that Héctor’s lack of knowledge could work against him. That the police could take his adamant denials as a sign of guilt, his incessant moping and hand-wringing as an overwrought act or evidence of a twisted mind.

But then, there were details about that night. Details that had slipped his notice, but that could be arranged to form a different picture than the one he apparently clung to. And if Imelda were to lead him to reexamine those details, an interrogation could become a piece in a different sort of investigation.

The more he pondered the notion, the less appealing it seemed. Risk permeated every phase, every layer of the plan, but aside from that, it seemed so _brutal._ So much harsher, so much more aggressive, than giving his friend a poisoned drink.

Then he thought of Imelda, demanding knowledge he could only deny having. Storming out of the cubicle and toward a place that would, in all likelihood, hold the answers she sought. Not all of them, but enough to know where to find more.

Ernesto drew his hand into a fist. She’d done it. Driven him to it. Had she stayed in one place, had she calmly waited for rescue like a sensible woman would have, she could have had it.

But she had left him no choice.

“They can’t ask him if there’s no one to ask.”


	8. Part Eight

Imelda would have liked nothing more than to march straight out of the station and into the night, but she was forced to take a more zigzag route. Upon finding a knot of people moving in the same general direction, she’d trail them closely but not too closely, break off and do the same with the next group. Once, she had to turn and go in the opposite direction, head bowed as she prayed she wouldn’t run into whoever pursued her.

It took only a moment to remember she fled someone who, in all likelihood, had found her family. She tried not to picture them sitting in an office or waiting by the bridge, trying to comprehend the agent or officer explaining that she simply ran off.

She would return. Sooner rather than later, she’d return, tell them only as much as was needed to allay concern, and share a few minutes of conversation before taking the blessing. There would be no way to explain all this to Coco or anyone else, but she would be home and that was what mattered.

After what seemed an hour, the doors stood before her. She resisted the urge to run through them, instead trailing behind a cluster of children led by a grey-haired skeleton couple. No voices followed her. No footsteps hurried to catch her. One moment she was inside the station; the next, she hurried down the stairs, head bowed, and ducked into the narrow space between the station and its nearest neighbor. Foot traffic was still present, but comparatively lighter, and she paused with her face to the wall as she thought through a plan.

She would need something to cover her face, if she were to have any chance of finding Héctor without interference. The curse had already turned both her hands to bone and encroached on her elbows. Her sleeves were still too short to hide her skin, but a brief glance might not raise any suspicion.

Her approach from the bridge had given her a chance to see it from a distance, all colored lights and towers that didn’t climb so much as meander toward the sky. She had caught glimpses of it on her way from the station to the bridge and back to the station again, though she’d had other things on her mind. But now that she saw it from the ground, one fact dominated her mind.

The Land of the Dead was an _enormous_ place.

In his letters, Héctor had described cities to her. The music of a thousand different conversations and footsteps and carts all blending together. Faces passing him by, too quick and numerous to remember but all of them so _interesting_ that he wished he could. Streets that meandered among building after building after building, a place that seemed to go on and on. _“The more I look,”_ he’d written, _“the more there is to see. We won’t be here long, and haven’t yet left, but I already want to return and share the sights with you.”_

The Land of the Dead was like several cities all stacked on top of each other, with noise and movement and _people,_ people everywhere she looked. Aside from Ernesto and a handful of clerks and agents, Imelda would be surprised if she’d passed the same face twice.

Finding one man in the midst of it all would have been next to impossible if she knew the terrain. As a stranger to it, she would have better luck going back into the station and asking to be sent home.

It wasn’t too late. The doors were still close; she had only to walk through and ask where her family might be. Go home and put Coco’s fears to rest. Go home and push her questions to the back of her mind.

Imelda drew a long breath. She needed something to cover her head. Something less conspicuous than her apron.

She moved out of the alley as quickly as she could, ducking into an even narrower alleyway and out of sight as a couple passed her. She’d probably drawn enough stares; if the authorities asked after a living woman, there would be a trail of witnesses. The sooner that trail went cold, the better. She only needed something, anything, to cover her hair and provide a modicum of concealment for her face.

There.

Brushed up against the bottom corner of a building some meters away was a cloth, or what appeared to be one. Imelda bowed her head and hurried toward it, scooped it up and examined what she’d found.

To say what it had once been would be nothing more than speculation. One long edge resembled a straight line, if a jagged one; the other wobbled and waved and eventually tapered off into a point. The whole thing was so covered in dirt and grime, pocked with small holes and tears, that Imelda could only guess at its original color.

But it would have to do.

Imelda pulled the cloth over her hair, putting thoughts of how long it had been on the ground and where it might have been before that out of her mind. She glanced behind, half-expecting to see someone watching her in disbelief, but the only people she saw were somewhat distant and walking in any direction but hers.

All she had to do now was find Héctor.

_December 7, 1921._ She could see the date in her mind’s eye as though the paperwork was in front of her again. So soon after he’d left. Too soon….

She drew the cloth forward, shielding her face. That wouldn’t hide it from view, but it would hopefully protect her from any casual glances. Find Héctor. Ask him a few simple questions, hear his answers. Go back to the station and return home. That was all she needed to do.

The bridge. She’d last seen him at the bridge. Perhaps he was no longer there, but that was her best chance.

*******

In theory, a living woman in the Land of the Dead wouldn’t be difficult to find. In practice, Héctor seemed to bump into everyone except his wife.

That was good, even if it didn’t seem that way. A blessing disguised as an inconvenience. He had time to think—not of what he’d say, but how he’d say it.

He’d left. That had been a fact from the moment he walked out the door. It hadn’t seemed a momentous decision at the time—though he doubted he would have done it without Ernesto assuring him every step of the way that this was normal, this was fine, Imelda liked to fret over nothing—but in the end, he’d failed to return.

_I’m sorry._ He’d say it as sincerely as he felt it, and then fall silent, listen to whatever she had to say—if she wanted to speak to him at all.

The crowd thinned once he got away from the bridge, but only slightly. The Department of Family Reunions had their hands full each Día de Muertos, though never so full that they couldn’t wave an officer over to handle the man impersonating a photo agent.

The only guarantee Imelda would be at the station, or anywhere near it, was time—and that had worn thin by the time Héctor worked up the nerve to go after her. Stations and bridges were close together by necessity—the frequency of travel issues demanded those working to resolve them stay within easy access—and she would not have had far to walk. Depending on how long she stayed at the station, she could have been there and to a different bridge entirely by the time Héctor reached it.

What if she’d already gone home?

Héctor stopped in his tracks as the notion solidified. She had other family—abuelos and primos and all the rest. They would have gone to visit their living relatives, but if the police were willing to chase him off the bridge and through at least one plaza, they would have sent out agents and officers in search of her other family. That one or more had been waiting at the station wasn’t outside the realm of possibility; and if that were not the case, she could have gone to the station to wait.

Away from him. Or, at the very least, in a place where she could more easily blend into a crowd while still being in proximity to her ticket home.

Or perhaps she’d gone off to clear her head. She’d done that before, left the house in a fury and returned an hour later, ready to turn their fight into a conversation. There was plenty of room to walk in the city, if that was what she’d intended to do.

He continued on to the station, walking as quickly as he could. It wasn’t difficult to spot, with its high walls and skull-adorned marble pillars; he realized he’d nearly broken into a run by the time he reached it and slowed to a stop, turning so he could scan the plaza.

No sign of her.

Héctor pushed through the doors. He could have just missed her. Could have turned away just as she stepped onto a busy street and vanished from sight, but he was already inside and she might be too.

He’d intended to comb the building, scanning each line and bench and knot of people for her face, for that leather apron over her dress, but he didn’t make it more than halfway through the atrium before he spied a police officer leaning forward over a counter as the clerk shook her head. With the distance and people between them, Héctor couldn’t hear what was said, but from the way the sight was repeated with both officers and photo agents, he could only assume they were looking for someone. A living someone, most likely.

She’d been to the station and left it without attracting a follower. It made his job more difficult, but he couldn’t help being impressed.

Once outside, Héctor paused only a moment. If the police and photo agents were asking clerks for directions, it seemed safe to assume no one had an inkling of where she’d gone. In that case, one direction was as good as another….or it would have been, save for the fact that choosing the wrong one could send him careening off away from her.

If she had gone off without being seen, she would have taken a path that kept her from being seen. Héctor could name four without thinking, seven if given a moment, and perhaps as many as a dozen if given a few resources and an hour to think. But he was familiar with the terrain. Imelda was not. She would have taken the easiest and quickest route that afforded her some measure of concealment.

Following said route wouldn’t guarantee he’d find her. Once she made it out of the alleyways and into the open, she could have gone in one of several directions. But it was the best chance he had.

*******

Imelda didn’t get as close to the bridge as she would have liked. There seemed to be more officers in the area than there had been when she left; after her third time cutting a wide berth around a familiar blue uniform, she decided it was best to peer in from a distance. She got within sight of the cubicle, found the booth where she’d first seen Héctor, and scanned the crowd. His mariachi suit would have stood out like diamonds on a pair of work boots, but she saw no sign of it.

She tugged the dirty, tattered cloth another few millimeters over her face and turned back toward the station. As long as she kept it in her sight, she could avoid getting lost. It would severely limit her movements around the city, but perhaps she could scout a path through the streets if she circled the station a few times.

Or she could simply go inside and wait for her family.

She dismissed the thought. She’d come too far, gone to too much trouble, to let Ernesto’s bizarre story nip at her until the day she died.

The station was not a small structure, by any means; Imelda turned down a narrow street and found that those towering walls and soaring pillars were still visible, if only slightly. She was no closer to Héctor, but she had found a means of navigation, albeit an unreliable one. Imelda hurried down one street and then another, doubled back and walked more slowly but still found no sign of him.

His paperwork had contained a wealth of information on his death, but none on his current whereabouts. No address or occupation, if any; no friends or frequent haunts or anything of the sort. It wouldn’t be there—the paperwork, from what she’d gathered, was intended only as a record of an individual’s death—but one would still think the Department of Family Reunions could add some small hint as to where said individual might be at a given time to make said reunion easier to arrange.

It occurred to her, as she left one street and entered another, checking to ensure the station was still in sight, that those records might exist after all, kept by a different department in a different part of the building. A building she could not yet return to.

Naturally.

She paused to get her bearings. The station was still within sight, and she was certain that if she did become lost, anyone on the street could give her directions to the nearest bridge. She might earn a few odd looks, but she doubted it would be worse than the half-raised browbones her improvised shawl received from a well-dressed couple as they passed.

At this rate, she’d be lucky if she found Héctor before sunrise.

There was a cross street up ahead. It seemed more prudent to keep going through the intersection, rather than take another turn and possibly lose sight of the station, seeing as the street she was on curved some distance ahead. She moved toward it, but before she reached the corner, a flash of white caught her eye.

It wasn’t the real Ernesto. From what she’d gathered that night, he would have made himself heard long before he made himself seen, and done it with a sentence that made her want to introduce his face to her boot. This mural depicted him as he had been in life, smiling face framed by the white brim of his hat, single curl spilling over his forehead. One hand held the neck of Héctor’s guitar, and the other plucked at the strings.

He had it, of course. Héctor had left everything behind, according to Ernesto’s story; that included the guitar he’d so long admired. And if he had kept Héctor’s songbook, he would have kept the guitar as well.

Yet seeing it in the hands of his likeness was _wrong._ The guitar was Héctor’s. It didn’t belong in another’s hands, even the hands of a friend. Especially not when said friend had reportedly awoken one morning to find he was alone, with nothing but possessions to remember him by. That guitar was full of memories, building to the moment where he’d allegedly lost his friend for good. Ernesto should have pushed those memories to the back of a closet, or tried to hand them off to her. Not displayed them to the world with an insipid smile.

“I—Imelda?”

She turned sharply, half-expecting an officer even as the familiarity of that voice made her heart skip a beat.

Héctor.

He stood a little more than a meter away, clutching a skeletal wrist in one hand. Sometimes he had paired the gesture with a nervous smile, though he wore a frown this time, and there was no hint of mirth in his eyes. Sorrow, perhaps. His jacket, which was worn thin in multiple places and fraying at the edges, opened to exposed ribs; bone-white toes peered through holes in his shoes, which appeared to have been a much darker brown at one point. Loops of green covered his chin above that familiar goatee and a small spray of orange and yellow dotted each cheekbone. A slight breeze stirred his hair, and she glimpsed more green, more yellow on his forehead.

He was twenty-one.

“I—I wasn’t sure it was you.” He took a few hesitant steps toward her. “I mean, I _thought_ it might be, but….”

He stopped, raking a hand through his hair. She couldn’t recall a time it had ever looked _neat._ Never awful, never unkempt, but he’d always considered anything more than running a comb through his hair to be a waste of time. Death, it seemed, had not robbed him of that perspective.

For decades, Imelda had planned what she might say, should he ever show his face again, writing out every last word in her head. Sometimes she envisioned herself unleashing a tirade lasting for minutes, ending only when she had no more breath to sustain it. At other times, she dreamed only of slamming the door in his face, calling through it that _If you wanted to come home, you should have done it five years ago._ Or ten. Or fifteen. Or seventeen. Or twenty-one. Should that walkaway músico show his face again, she would not be at a loss for words.

And now, she could only watch as his next step separated the sole of one shoe from the top.

“Lo siento, Imelda.”

He said it without any sort of resentment or expectation, simply letting the words be. Lo siento. I’m sorry. He set them before twenty-one years of absence and waited for her to notice how small they were.

She had imagined him saying them. Perhaps not the way he did, but she’d imagined it nonetheless, and she knew she’d have questions. Where he’d been for Coco’s childhood, her quince, her wedding. How long he’d planned to never return—whether it had been the idea from the beginning or whether it had been introduced between Mexico City and the city following. How he could write letters, poetry for her and disappear. About Coco, had he ever once thought of Coco? About what the gossips would say behind her back, did he know how lucky their daughter had been to find a man who ignored every last rumor and doted on her?

Now, those questions had been replaced with others. Questions about his death, its date, Ernesto’s claims. They clamored to the front of her mind, and she found herself asking precisely none of them.

“What on earth happened to your shoes?”

He looked down, as if he’d forgotten about them until she asked. He blinked at his feet a moment. “I—ah—they’re—they’re old. Not the ones I came here with.”

Gold glinted in his mouth as he spoke. She’d avoided his letters for over two decades now, but the earlier ones had brimmed with details. He would have mentioned an incident requiring the purchase of a new tooth, and she would have remembered. Questions piled on top of questions, and she’d asked about his shoes.

“Héctor, I….” Whatever she’d intended to say fled her mind. Here he was, the man who had left her alone with a child to raise in a town full of gossips, with worn clothes and tattered shoes clinging to his frame. Dead as long as he’d been alive.

She drew a breath. It did little to steady her, but it would have to be enough. “I need to talk with you. Not here.”

A brief glance showed Héctor nodding in understanding. “They’re looking for you.” Her surprise must have shown on her face, because he continued: “I went to the station first.”

So this was no chance meeting. He’d pursued her—for what? To apologize? “Is there a place we can talk?”

He paused, looking away as he clutched his wrist again. “Sí, but it’s not _great._ Not the nicest place, I mean.”

The extent of what she was planning struck her all at once. Héctor knew the city. He would, after over twenty years. She’d been there less than one night and had only avoided losing her way by maintaining line of sight with a station full of people who had been working since her arrival to ensure she didn’t die at sunrise. Now she intended to follow a man she hadn’t seen in twenty-one years through unfamiliar streets to a place she’d never seen that was, by his own admission, substandard at best.

She’d trusted him once.

Imelda looked to the mural. If the artist had wanted a painting of Ernesto, they could have painted Ernesto standing onstage or walking down a street or grinning stupidly. Instead, his likeness held Héctor’s guitar as though he had always owned it, while Héctor stood beside her in threadbare clothes and shoes that should have been discarded a year ago.

She didn’t trust herself to speak. Not without spilling a dozen half-formed thoughts into his hands. Instead, she turned back to Héctor, drew another breath, and nodded.

He didn’t brighten, not quite, but a little of the sorrow clinging to him fell away. Another word from her, a small bit of encouragement, and she knew he would cheer even more. He might even smile.

She shook the thought away.

Once she asked her questions, there was no guarantee Héctor would tell the truth. She had to remain impartial. Aloof, or as disconnected as possible, if she were to weigh his story against Ernesto’s and sift fact from fabrication. She straightened and checked her makeshift shawl, though she knew it was in place already.

“Show me.”

For a moment, it looked as if he would offer his hand; but he saved her from the decision and motioned her to follow instead. Imelda crossed the street after, pausing to cast one final glance at the station’s rooftop.

Then Héctor led her further down the street, and the last remnants of the station disappeared below the skyline.


	9. Part Nine

Imelda wanted to talk.

From what Héctor had overheard that night, it would have been significant enough, if she’d come to the Land of the Dead in the usual way. But Imelda had never been one to do things the way most people did them, and so here she was, following him down a narrow street as she slowly faded to bone.

She walked in silence, and so did he. If she didn’t want to speak just yet, he wouldn’t press it. But he couldn’t get the image out of his head, those skeletal hands reaching up to adjust the tattered cloth draped around her still-living face. He’d seen it first as a single hand glinting white, but now the curse had nearly overtaken both forearms.

He followed the road down a sharp curve, and she did the same. He shouldn’t ask. It might be his business, it might not be, and it was better to err on the side of caution. If she wanted to tell him, she’d have told him already.

“How long do you have?”

She hesitated a few seconds. “Sunrise.”

“Sunrise,” he repeated. Still hours off, but close. Too close. He quickened his pace, leading her down a wider street that nonetheless provided a more direct route to Shantytown.

“How far is this place?”

“Not far.” The shanties were always closer than most cared to acknowledge, wrapped around the bases of towering structures throughout the city. His, or the one he stayed in, was within comfortable distance of the Santa Cecilia bridge—or as comfortable a distance as anything could be, in a city of that size.

Imelda fell silent again. Sunrise. She had until sunrise, and she’d fled the authorities to find him. To talk with him. She would have known what she was risking, and that made him want to pull her into the nearest alleyway or alcove and beg her to say what she had to say then and there. Then, send her home, or find someone who could.

But a random alcove or alley was only slightly less private than the middle of the street, and she’d already risked discovery by speaking with him. And then there was the fact that if he simply pulled her aside and insisted they speak there or not at all, it was quite likely she would choose the latter option.

He nearly asked if she knew how she might return, considered how such a question might be taken, and decided against it. 

The narrow street was sparsely occupied, at this time and on this night in particular. Most everyone not visiting family in the Land of the Living was out on balconies or walking more open paths, vying for a good view of the upcoming fireworks. Perhaps he and Imelda could have exchanged a few words without risking being exposed, but whatever Imelda had to say would be better said—and heard—in the relative privacy of a bungalow in Shantytown.

Of all the places he could have taken her, he’d settled on that one.

Héctor wasn’t ashamed of Shantytown, or the people in it. His search for his Mamá had led him to a different kind of family, people with no photos and no ofrendas, who politely avoided the question of why such a young man, who had been dead less than thirty years, had a family disinclined to welcome him home. Of course, the fact he spent each Día de Muertos enacting scheme after scheme to reach said home made him even more of an oddity than his strong white bones, but most of those who didn’t help him with the planning stage simply laughed and shook their heads.

But as the stairs drew nearer, he wished he’d had the time to think of a different destination. Nothing had come to mind during their walk over, but had he a little more time, he knew he could have come up with something. The city was full of places that wouldn’t come across as a ploy for guilt, a plea for pity.

“It’s…here?” Imelda hesitated at the top of the steps. “Down there?”

So she’d noticed. They were still too distant to see the shacks, the docks swaying in the water, the yellowing bones and shaking limbs, but she saw the stone stairs and the hastily constructed wooden ones set atop them. He could almost hear her mind whirring, trying to decide whether it was more prudent to risk stepping into a hole or chance a loose nail in just the wrong place.

“Listen, Imelda….” He fought for the words, but everything that came to mind sounded like yet another ploy for guilt, sympathy, or both. “This place….a lot of people live here. Not just me.”

“I hadn’t guessed.”

“And they’re friendly! I mean, I live with them, so I should know. They’re…you’ll like them. If you meet them, I mean. Or stop and talk. Or…”

She regarded him a long moment. Darkness and shawl concealed her expression, but he knew it had to be somewhere between quizzical and cross, leaning more heavily on the latter.

“Just a little further.” He didn’t mean for it to come out on a sigh, but there was no taking it back, so he headed down the wooden steps. Imelda paused a moment, then clattered after.

He heard Shantytown before he saw it—a too-familiar tune on the breeze, blending with the sounds of laughter and boisterous conversation. Under ordinary circumstances—or more ordinary ones, at any rate—it all would have drawn a smile, but he stole a quick glance at Imelda and saw she’d stopped in her tracks.

*******

There was music.

To her back was the city, a sprawling expanse of colored lights reaching for the sky, all angled towers and cobblestone streets bustling with people. Nearer, but still behind, was a set of ancient stone steps, run with cracks and pocked with holes, and a set of wooden stairs that had somehow supported her weight. An opening in the wall loomed ahead, surrounded by murals of winged skeletons; through it she saw flickering light and heard laughter at a pitch and volume usually obtained with the aid of alcohol.

And it was the music that stopped her.

She heard the guitar before she paid the voices any mind. Notes running after and over one another, forming a playful tune—she could see those notes in her head, written across the pages of a songbook she carried in her apron, though she was no longer certain of their exact placement. She could hear Héctor’s voice singing, hear her own answering back, feel the rush of air past her skirts and the laughter in her throat.

The guitarist missed two notes in quick succession, and the memory thinned. She was back in the present, a curse over her head and her dead husband standing close by.

“We…we can go somewhere else.”

Somewhere else. Somewhere the music wasn’t, but Héctor would still be there. Now that she’d heard the song, she knew it would follow him.

“’Un Poco Loco,’” she said at last. “You…you taught it to them.”

He looked away, but not before she caught something cross his face. Something like resignation. “ _I_ didn’t teach anyone, but they learned.”

The back of her neck prickled as her mind fought to make a connection she couldn’t see. “How?”

His frown deepened; his eyes narrowed a bit. “They heard Ernesto singing it,” he said slowly, as if waiting for her to assure him she was only joking. “He’s famous now?”

“I knew _that._ ” She regretted those words the moment she spoke them, but went ahead with her thought regardless. “I….haven’t listened to much music.”

“Surely you heard _his_ music.”

The distant guitarist resumed singing. The words were the same as she remembered, but there was an edge to them, a suggestive wink that had never once made its way into Héctor’s many renditions. Her neck prickled again. She felt as though a dozen secrets had been exchanged behind her back.

“Let’s not talk about this in the open,” she said at last.

Héctor gazed at her for a minute—just a minute. “This way.”

Imelda walked toward the music. The songbook had been in Ernesto’s possession at his death, and she had heard his attempts at songwriting. Of course he would have used Héctor’s songs. Even if his story was a lie, there was a chance he had come by them honestly. Perhaps Héctor had asked him to keep them alive in the event of his death. That didn’t explain why Ernesto had no apparent knowledge of said death, or why he hadn’t seen fit to inform her, but perhaps Héctor’s account could fill in those holes.

The place he’d led her didn’t simply sit beside the water, but on it. Bungalows that appeared to be built from scrap wood sat on stilts; she followed Héctor onto one of the docks and took a larger step than necessary when it swayed beneath her feet. Héctor reached for her, but she managed to right herself before his help became necessary.

“Keep your face covered,” he murmured. “They….well, a lot of them haven’t seen a living person in a while.”

She nearly asked why, but remembered the photos, the fact she could not return without one. She thought of their family photo, the one she’d torn so only she and Coco remained. A tear she’d made decades before learning of Héctor’s death.

“They’re fine,” he went on. “Good people. Just….not sure what they’d do.”

Imelda pulled the cloth a little further over her forehead, felt a breath of cool air on her neck, and tugged it back, then trailed behind Héctor as she followed him down the dock.

“Ay, it’s Héctor!”

“Tía Florina!”

Imelda watched as the two embraced, trying to remember if he’d ever mentioned a Florina or any other tía. She’d pushed those conversations to the back of her mind, but she couldn’t recount a mention of any family but his mother. No father he remembered in any detail, no tías or tíos, and certainly no siblings—but then, there was no reason why he couldn’t have been introduced to an entire host of forgotten family after his death.

“Did the guards let la Señora Marquéz cross the bridge this year?”

“ _Eh….._ ”

Florina’s bones bore a yellow cast. Perhaps it was only the light, though when Héctor stood near her, the difference was pronounced. Her hair was grey, piled atop her head, and she hadn’t risen from her chair, not even when Héctor embraced her. She chuckled.

“Ay, don’t tell me they weren’t swayed by her charms?”

“I…didn’t get to the bridge this time. So eh, who knows. They might’ve been.”

“Didn’t get to the bridge?”

“It’s….a long story.” Before she could press further, he straightened. “Did, ah, did anyone come looking for me?”

“Not tonight.” Her smile turned sad, but Héctor simply kissed her cheek, thanked her, and tilted his head for Imelda to follow.

She hurried to catch up, as quickly as the swaying dock would allow. How Héctor kept his balance so well was beyond her. “You never mentioned a tía.”

The question sent a confused frown across his face, lasting a few steps. “Oh! Tía Florina isn’t—I mean, she’s not _quite_ my aunt? She is but she isn’t.”

Sometimes, during their brief years of marriage, Imelda had wondered if Héctor could hear her raise her eyebrows or roll her eyes or give a sardonic smile when his back or hers was turned. This time, when his gaze was averted and hers was on an upcoming turn, was no different. She said nothing, he saw nothing, and yet he answered.

“I mean, we’re not _related,_ but that’s just….kind of how we do things here. Call each other family, you know?”

“Cousin Héctor!”

He didn’t stop, but he did exchange a few cheerful, warm words of greeting.

In a way—in the barest and most basic of ways—she had been right, she thought. Héctor had left one family and found another—one of tías and primos with yellowing bones and uneven gaits, not a beautiful woman who clung to every word he spoke. He smiled at anyone who smiled back, and some who didn’t, negotiating a candle and a match with a few friendly words and a promise.

She remembered this Héctor, this warmth, the way it pulled you in like a roaring fire and revealed the stars pinning back the darkest nights.

He’d thought the world needed that warmth more than she did.

She trailed him around a corner, taking it in small steps for fear of tipping into that dark water, down a less occupied path, stopping at a bungalow missing a few boards from its roof. He stepped inside without a word.

There wasn’t much in the way of possessions, not the sort people would want to claim, at any rate. A few wooden crates, some resting on their sides and others upright, were scattered on the floor. Odds and ends were piled in the corners—rusty nails and tin cans, soaked papers, bits of cloth even more ragged than the covering Imelda’s hair. The floor was dry, but washes of dust bore witness to recent floodings. Now that she stood beneath it, she saw the roof was pocked with smaller holes in addition to the larger ones she’d seen, letting in faint pinpricks of light from outside.

“Please tell me you don’t live here.”

Héctor gave the smallest of chuckles, pulling a couple of crates close enough to serve as chairs. “No one does. I stay with one of the tías or primos, when I come around.”

He set a candle on a larger crate and struck a match.

“This is that one place everyone talks about fixing, but no one feels—“ He paused, course-corrected, and continued. “Well, no one ever does.”

It wasn’t a proper table, or proper chairs, but he stood beside it anyway, waiting for her to take a seat. Despite the absurdity of the gesture, she did, and he sat opposite.

“How often do you come here?”

He shrugged. “Often enough, I guess. Don’t always work nearby.”

There was more, but she didn’t press him for it. A guitarist—she didn’t know if it was the same one as before—strummed a few chords that made her fingers tighten on the makeshift table before he quite literally changed his tune.

“What’s wrong?”

So he’d seen. She nearly deflected the question, realized the answer would give her a chance to ask her own, and reconsidered. “It—sounded like the song you played when you proposed.”

He paused, apparently turning it over in his mind, pairing the words with what he’d seen. “You….don’t like it anymore?”

She bristled, and then paused. “It was…difficult to hear again, after you left. All of it was.”

The song stopped for a few beats and then resumed.

“All music, you mean.”

In her head, Imelda had often constructed the moment when she revealed the music ban. Sometimes, in those imaginings, she would shout— _I haven’t so much as listened to a full song in twenty years, and now you think you can win me back with one?_ Other times, she would simply lock the door, close the windows, and say through one of the other that his music was no longer welcome. And now, all she could do was flatten her hands on the crate.

“What was I _supposed_ to think, Héctor? You laugh and tell me everything will be fine, and then you just _stop writing_? Dios mio, your last letter was less than half a page! Nothing more than a some news and a few lines about how you wanted to come home—then _nothing._ What was I supposed to take from that?”

She’d said harsher things in her head, but his downcast eyes and look of resigned despair stabbed her with regret.

“I missed you, Imelda. You and Coco. I wasn’t lying when I said that. I—when they told me you were here, and alive, I….”

The letters had stopped shortly before his death—a few weeks, perhaps, though the more she considered it, the more she thought she recalled a letter arriving in late November. He’d died at twenty-one, and she wanted to shout at him for leaving.

“I sing to you. You and Coco, every year.”

There was no trace of accusation or bitterness in his words. A little embarrassment, perhaps, but no anger. She looked to him.

“The one I sang when I asked you to marry me.”

Despite her anger, despite the ache in her stomach, she felt a smile tug at her lips. “The second time, you mean.”

“Hey! The first one doesn’t count!”

“It’s the one I accepted, so it counts.” Her smile faded as she remembered those notes, played to her on as she stood on her balcony so long ago, preceding words she’d inspired: _And I never knew, I could want so much, but it’s true…._

The same notes that had driven her from her home earlier that evening.

Her hand went to her apron, slipped into the pocket. Her fingers brushed the cover of Héctor’s songbook.

“Did you sing tonight?”

“Sí,” he said, a bit curiously. “Why?”

“What time?”

“Around sunset, I guess.”

The back of her neck prickled again. Something was there, some connection still too blurred for her to make out. She pulled the songbook from her apron, just enough to see it, to hold it in her hand, the motion largely concealed by the makeshift table.

“Héctor,” she said, realizing as his eyes met hers that, in the Land of the Dead, her question might not be considered polite. “How…how did it happen?”

“How did I die, you mean?”

She nodded. Candlelight danced on the red cover of the songbook. She turned her gaze back to Héctor as his dropped to the crate.

“It’s stupid, really. I…I still don’t know how I let it happen.”

“Food poisoning?”

He looked up in surprise.

“I saw your paperwork,” she admitted, though not to how she’d obtained it. She fought for the words for her next question. “Was it….did they already know when you got here?”

“I told them. They—they asked. I guess they always ask.”

Perhaps that was the end of it. Perhaps he hadn’t wandered off, as Ernesto said, but he had met his end through contaminated food—an end so anticlimactic and unwise that Ernesto had agreed to not acknowledge it for fear of embarrassing his friend.

It sounded even more illogical when put into words.

“Could you tell me what happened before?”

Héctor paused again. Candlelight flickered over his features.

“Por favor,” she said, softening her tone. "I….I just want to know."

After a long minute, he sighed, resting one elbow on the table, forehead in his hand. "It was an accident. Just a stupid accident…."


	10. Part Ten

December 7, 1921 was simply another day on the road, another night in a cheap hotel that looked identical to every other cheap hotel in the country. Posadas was fast approaching, but had it been any other month, he would have left on that night. The thought of sweeping his wife and daughter into hug after hug and talking for days of all he’d missed and simply being there with them made him want to walk out that door and run straight to Santa Cecilia. 

He’d had his suitcase packed more or less for months; they spent so much of their time on trains or on their way to them that he never bothered to unpack more than what he needed for the moment. A comb here. A clean shirt there. So on that night, when the only thing out in the open was his songbook, packing his things took little effort. His train was still a while off, but for the first time in months, he couldn’t get to the station soon enough. After a brief argument with Ernesto, he….

The argument? More of a quarrel, really. Nothing serious. Nothing at _all._ Far shorter than some of the arguments they’d put behind them.

“You want to give up _now_? When we’re _this close_ to reaching our dream?”

“This was _your_ dream. You’ll manage.”

On the occasions Héctor replayed that conversation in his head, he wondered if he _—he—_ had said something so dismissive. So callous. Here he was marching off into the night, stranding his best friend in Mexico City, and all he had to say was _You’ll manage_? A trembling, not the sort that showed but the sort that rattled him down to the core, took hold of him, but it didn’t change what he’d said.

He wasn’t _frightened_ of Ernesto, not really. The man was his friend. His brother. There was no reason to be afraid of him, but he’d never liked confrontation. 

“I can’t do it without your songs, Héctor!”

 _Without your songs._ That….was a rather odd thing to say, perhaps, but then, Héctor’s songs were what drew crowds. He knew it and Ernesto knew it. No, _I can’t do it without your songs_ wasn’t a strange thing to say, not in that moment.

“I’m going _home,_ Ernesto. Hate me if you want, but my mind is made up.”

Ernesto _had_ remained angry after their spats—sometimes for hours at a stretch—but they’d always gone back to talking, so long as Héctor avoided the topic of home for a few days. _Hate me if you want_ was borne out of the fear that Ernesto might not speak to him upon his eventual return to Santa Cecilia. And after his hermano left him to fend for himself in unfamiliar territory, that would be understandable. Forgivable, even.

He tore his suitcase free, turning away just as his friend’s face hardened into anger, or something stronger.

“Oh, I could never hate you.” He’d said it like that, all fury smoothed from his voice, the words reaching Héctor’s ears just as the cool night air and scents of Mexico City greeted him. The latter was more welcome than the former, but the former eased the knot in his stomach some. “If you must go, I….I’m sending you off with a toast.”

Héctor had one ticket to Santa Cecilia in his pocket, for a train that was still a while off, at a station within sight of the hotel. There was time for a toast, just one toast, and yet the sooner he left the sooner he’d be on his way home. Then again, he thought, casting a tired glance down the street, a minute’s delay would make little difference.

Besides. He’d been invited to a toast. Just a quick toast with a friend. His harsh words had all but ensured they’d leave on unfriendly terms. Ernesto offered a chance to part ways as the friends they’d always been.

Some things about that tour remained fuzzy, as the number of years between then and now grew. The names and precise locations of hotels they’d stayed in. The order in which they’d visited cities. Which people they’d met at which shows and on which trains. Recalling those things was like recalling what he'd eaten on a randomly selected Tuesday in 1916. But he remembered the toast.

“To our friendship,” Ernesto said, clinking his glass against Héctor’s. Even now, he could smell the tequila as though he held that glass in his hands. “I would move Heaven and Earth for you, mi amigo. Salud.”

He drank. They both did.

He didn’t remember exactly how far he walked. Not far. There were a few words, pleasant ones, exchanged between the two of them, but he couldn’t recall what was said.

He remembered the pain.

It gripped his stomach as quickly and unexpectedly as a punch to the gut. He doubled over, clutched at the pain, drew a few ragged breaths and waited but it remained. 

“Perhaps it was the chorizo, my friend.”

Ernesto sounded…calm. Quite calm, actually. But then, there was no reason not to be. Yes, seeing one’s friend doubled over in the middle of the street would be disconcerting, but there was a cause. Spoiled food. Simple. One simple, stupid choice. That calm, those words—they were an attempt to quiet fear, keep panic at bay. They were _kind._

The pain doubled in intensity. It had to abate. It couldn’t last. He could see black smoke billowing from a train; it wouldn’t be _his_ train but he had to be there when it left the station. He had his ticket. He had time. He had to get home.

He swayed. His grip on his suitcase, his guitar, loosened; he thought he felt Ernesto take the latter from his hand.

He had to stay standing. Had to get to the train.

He sank to his knees.

He didn’t remember hitting the ground.

******

The music had stopped.

Héctor, usually able to name the note that concluded a song, couldn’t say when this one had ceased. He only knew it had, leaving snatches of conversation, familiar voices blurred by distance and alcohol, to drift toward them as water lapped an irregular rhythm at the underside of the bungalow.

“I…” His voice faltered. “I tried to go back, once I realized what happened. I mean, I asked. The people at the station—I asked them.” No one had smiled then, and he didn’t smile now. “I don’t think I was the first.”

Imelda looked at something on her lap, something just out of sight. For all her prior questions, she now sat in silence. She looked to him after a long moment, her candlelit face reflecting the disquiet he felt.

“Ernesto said you left in the middle of the night.”

The words hit him like a blow. “ _What?_ ”

“I spoke to him at the bridge. He…seemed intent on staying with me, and when the border agent told me you’d died, that’s what he said. You left without your suitcase, he woke up and you were gone.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No—Imelda, he was _there._ Why…” He let the question’s trail end as he looked ahead toward its conclusion. A shape waited there, something twisted and venomous that he had only glimpsed in fragments.

He stood so abruptly the crate tipped onto its side. Pacing toward the far wall did nothing to ease the cold, sick feeling gnawing at his core, but he couldn’t stay still.

“Héctor?”

He stopped. Her voice was the gentlest it had been all evening. The chill spread, wrapping around his arms and shoulders.

“Have you spoken to Ernesto since his death?”

There was no demand in that question. He could refuse—and what was more, he could end further inquiries there. _I don’t want to talk about it._ At those words, she would end her questions. They might be an answer in and of themselves, but no other questions would follow.

“No.”

“Have you tried?”

A _no_ would be a lie. A _no_ would end this line of questioning, keep him from moving toward that twisted shape. A _no_ would cut through the dread in her eyes, in her voice.

“Once.”

“Not since?”

They’d come at him before he got more than a glimpse of his old friend. In minutes, he’d had an arm twisted out of socket, the first in a cascade of pain arranged to form a clear message: Don’t come back.

"He's famous, Imelda." The words sounded weak even before he voiced them. 

"You were his best friend." 

Héctor walked to the far wall, peered out through a hole and walked back. She didn't say it. She didn't need to say it.  _He watched you die. Don't you think he'd want a reunion after all this time? Don't you think he'd miss you?_

She looked to her lap again. Now that he was on his feet, he saw a familiar shape in her hands, candlelight illuminating the red cover in snatches.

“He had this,” Imelda said. Her voice was still soft. Too soft, to deliver any sort of good news. “It seems he wanted to be buried with it.”

Buried with the songbook he’d taken from Héctor’s fallen suitcase. Taking it, and any secrets it might contain, to the grave. He could have drawn up a will, added stipulations to keep the book’s existence and final resting place secret. Héctor couldn’t raise his voice above a hoarse whisper any more than he could take his eyes off the songbook. “He…he never returned it to you.”

He knew the answer before she spoke, but he had to hear it. “No.”

“Or the guitar.”

“As far as I knew, _you_ kept them when you decided not to return. I wouldn’t have known he had them if I hadn’t found this.” She cradled it in her hands, running a thumb over the cover. The image of her tearfully handing it to his amigo— _“Take it, I can’t be reminded of what happened”—_ crumbled and fell.

“I thought you gave it to him.”

“Why would I do that, Héctor?” Her grip tightened on the songbook—not much, but enough to be noticed.

“I….”

“You wrote these songs for me. For _us._ Don’t you think I would have wanted to keep them in the family? Read them when I thought of you, sing to Coco when she cried for her Papá? _Why_ would I give them to a man who thought ‘Un Poco Loco’ should be borderline indecent?”

With each new development, Héctor had crafted a story to explain it. If his photo remained absent from the family ofrenda, then something must have happened—a water spill, or a fire, or simple misplacement—that rendered it unusable. If the newly dead sang “El Mundo Es Mi Familia” and attributed it to Ernesto, then Imelda must have given him permission to play it; and if they sang “Recuérdame,” then it was because Imelda didn’t know it was meant for an audience of one and Coco was too young to explain. If his guitar appeared on covers and posters in Ernesto’s hands, then Imelda must have given her approval. Everything was permitted, everything was done with the knowledge and blessing of the wife he’d left behind.

“He—Ernesto—he would’ve told you.”

“I only learned tonight.”

He knew that. He’d known that, and yet hearing it sent his panic on a steep climb. Héctor moved from one side of the bungalow to the other in seconds; he grasped a handful of his hair and drew his hand through, letting it fall to his side. “He knew—he would’ve told, he would’ve gone to you as soon as he could. That—that train ticket. I didn’t have it with me.”

“What are you saying?”

“I—I came here with the photo, the one I left with. I—I still have it, Imelda, but not the ticket. I—I thought I lost it when I fell, thought he—he took it to go back to you, tell you what happened, but….”

He felt an echo of that pain gripping his middle, tearing through his stomach. Tearing him away from the songbook Imelda carried with her.

Away from the guitar Ernesto had taken from his hand.

He’d seen the pieces separately, spaced far enough apart that the picture they formed lacked cohesion. It could have been a picture of an accident and a family who did their best to respect his unknown wishes, or that of an amigo who did what he pleased despite knowing better.

Now that the holes had been filled in, now that new details were added and those he’d had all along were pushed into their proper places, he saw. He saw, and he heard.

He saw the moments, the seconds it took for shaking fury to bleed into fondness.

He saw the effort behind Ernesto’s smile, straining to keep it in place as he poured the tequila.

He heard the lack of concern— _“Perhaps it was that chorizo, my friend.”_ Not an attempt at comfort. Not kindness. It had never been kindness.

None of it had been.

“He—he couldn’t have—couldn’t have done it.” He was pacing again. “He—he was _there,_ he stayed with me, he—he—he—“

Héctor braced his hands against the wall, trembling all over, unable to see past that smile Ernesto had worn.

“He—I thought—I thought he was _happy,_ not that I was leaving, but he—he—“

He heard Imelda’s footsteps, but didn’t connect them to an action until her hand rested on his shoulder. The first time they’d touched in decades, and he crumpled into her arms without a thought. Once she had her arms around him, once she wrapped him tightly in her embrace, the strength left his limbs and she sank with him to the floor.

It wasn’t enough to stop the thoughts in his head. Wasn’t enough to make him forget the lingering burn of that tequila, of that calm, of that _smile,_ he couldn’t erase that smile from his memory.

Imelda pulled him closer. He tried to forget everything but her arms around him, her heart pounding against his ribs, her shaking breath on his neck.

He couldn’t forget.

******

_“Mamá? Where’s Papá?”_

Coco hadn’t waited until the letters ceased to ask that question. And prior to that, Imelda had only to read his latest letter to give her daughter an answer. He was in Guadalajara. In Puebla City. He was probably on a train as they spoke, headed to the next city, the next crowd waiting for his music.

Only when the letters stopped did the question become desperate.

It was December then, and every child knew when Christmas approached. Coco was no exception, nor was she too small to know that her Papá ought to be home for it. So Imelda’s answer changed. He’ll be home. No te preocupes, mija, perhaps he’ll be home tomorrow. Before long, she’d stopped answering Coco’s questions with anything committal, keeping speculation to herself. He’d be home before Posadas. By the beginning of Posadas. Before the end of Posadas. Noche Buena, he’d be home for Noche Buena. Everyone would be home for Noche Buena.

Héctor did not return for Noche Buena, and she’d locked the door behind him.

She’d thought he had a choice.

_“Just a stupid accident….”_

Héctor trembled in her arms. He’d collapsed in the middle of the street as his friend—his _brother_ —called his murder an accident and Héctor had believed him. He’d watched that hermano claim his songs as his own and strut through the streets in glittering white while his ruined shoes carried him to whatever work he could find, and he’d thought it was a meal that killed him.

Ernesto hadn’t confessed. There would be no tainted glass for the authorities to find, and whatever toxic substance he’d slipped into a drink and handed to his amigo with a smile was long gone. Imelda still felt the mountain of evidence in Héctor’s favor might topple and crush her beneath its weight.

_“Where’s Papá?”_

_I’ve found him, mija._ Her eyes stung as she pulled Héctor closer on the dust-strewn floor. _He’s here, Coco. He’s always been here._

“He knew, Imelda.” His voice was scarcely above a whisper, and the pain made her fury rise, sent tears tumbling onto his threadbare jacket. “He knew I wanted to go home.”


	11. Part Eleven

Even before taking up work with Ernesto de la Cruz, Raúl Badilla had been no stranger to the shanties clustered around the edges of the city.

It wasn’t the sort of place most people liked to visit. Communities comprised primarily of the sick and dying were never a thing the healthy approached with any sort of comfort, in life or in death. Raúl could hardly fault the general population for keeping their distance, even if their aversion meant wide hats and gloves had always been the order of the day, lest his white bones stick in someone’s memory.

There was an art to approaching strangers with an unusual question, and the technique varied widely based on where those strangers happened to be. Who you approached was every bit as important as how you approached them. In Shantytown, that often meant taking a moment to judge who had drunk enough to be loud, and who had drunk enough to be talkative. It was a game of sorts, one that became easier with practice. 

Fortunately for Raúl, a necessary piece was already in place.

His name was Lazaro—Tío Lazaro to those who’d died younger, Lazaro to his peers, and a slew of other names to those who had known him in life— _if_ you believed half the stories he told. Raúl believed about a quarter of them, and didn’t need to fake a smile at his approach. 

“Hola.”

“Look who’s here another year,” Lazaro said, offering a bottle by way of greeting. Less than half the contents remained, though it was impossible to tell how full it had been when found. “Still no photo?”

Raúl shook his head, both in response to the question and to the bottle.  

“Ay, you’re still young.” Lazaro refilled a chipped shot glass and took a swig. “Gotta remember you sometime.”

Raúl smiled, less wistfully than Lazaro likely expected, though he doubted the older man noticed. His photo might be permanently absent from the family ofrenda, but the things he’d done in life would be remembered for generations to come. He liked to picture his sobrinos overhearing whispers from parent and tíos and carrying the news, wide-eyed and low-voiced, to their primos. 

On some occasions, Raúl would have taken him up on the unspoken invitation to sit and talk awhile. But there was work to be done and a problem to find, so he plunged ahead. “You haven’t seen a man in a mariachi suit, have you?”

The description was vague enough to suit a number of men throughout the city, but so far as Raúl was aware, it suited only one who frequented this particular cluster of shanties. “Saw Héctor walk by not too long ago.”

“No one else?”

“Think a woman followed him? Not sure. Just saw Héctor and waved.”

A woman. So he’d found his widow. Raúl shook his head again. “No, not looking for Héctor. I think this one’s name was Andrés.”

Lazaro frowned. He often did that when searching his memory for something relevant to the conversation—although Lazaro’s definition of _relevant_ often differed sharply from that embraced by most. “Andrés….I think I _knew_ an Andrés once. Was he the one I was with at the river, when we….no, that wasn’t him….”

Raúl smiled and patted his shoulder. As much as he would have liked to hear three different stories unravel before Lazaro got to the one he wanted, he had to be seen leaving Shantytown before Héctor did, preferably well before. Despite the disguise, despite covering his tracks with a false target, despite the unlikelihood of his friend implicating him in what was about to happen, it was best not to take more chances than were strictly necessary.

******

He could have come home.

The thought took root as the hollow ache in Imelda’s middle numbed. He’d purchased a ticket and had it in his pocket, had his suitcase packed and guitar in hand. A train had been ready to carry him back to Santa Cecilia. Depending on exactly when his train left the station, he could have arrived in early darkness or close to first light.

She would have been asleep when he arrived. Perhaps he would have knocked, waking her and Coco before dawn. More likely he would have simply come inside and gently shaken her awake, brushing callused fingers against her cheek, smiling in that brief moment of muted awareness—those few seconds before she slapped him for leaving and kissed him for coming back. Coco would have bounced on the bed, chattering happily and hugging him over and over.

He could have seen her that day.

And not just that day, not just Posadas or Noche Buena or her quince or her wedding. He could have seen her on any of the ordinary days that followed, days where they cooked and cleaned and laughed and bickered and made shoes.

He could have met Julio. Victoria. Rosita.

They could have heard his music.

He could have heard them talk.

He’d wanted to come home. He’d _chosen_ to come home, and the choice had been taken from his hands. Snatched away by a man he’d trusted with his life.

Imelda wanted to storm out of the bungalow and march straight to the city, find the first person who knew where Ernesto might be and demand they take her there. She wanted to scream what he’d done to anyone who would listen. She wanted to burst into tears all over again, but she whispered instead.

“I’m going to find him.”

******

Shantytown had more than one entrance, more than one exit, but many of those required tools or some level of creativity to use. Leaving by water meant a boat and a stunningly brave or stunningly reckless willingness to see what lurked beyond the horizon. Smaller doorways required disassembling one’s bones in some fashion—little issue for one held together by faint wisps of living memory, but impossible for the living. Even if she were to slip through that jagged hole ten feet off the ground, la Señora Rivera would still need to take the same rickety wooden stairs back to the city.

The question of _where_ to wait remained, however. Lurking beside the entrance, such as it was, would allow him quicker access to the couple, but anyone close enough to hear would rush to their aid. A near-forgotten tío or tía might not move quickly or be capable of much in the way of fighting, but they had him outnumbered and could still block the stairs.

Stairs that would be difficult enough to negotiate with one hostage, let alone two.

******

Héctor heard the words, he understood them all, and yet it took a moment to comprehend what they all meant _together._

He pulled back, not out of her embrace but enough to search her eyes, her expression, for any trace of humor. Any indication, no matter how small, that she had made an awful joke. He saw only steel.

“He _killed you,_ Héctor.”

It was the truth, the only story that set all the pieces in their proper places and filled in the gaps, but he would have rather had the same lie he’d believed since awakening in New Arrivals all those years ago. Ernesto smiling, handing him a glass of poisoned tequila that he drank without a thought. He shuddered, and Imelda pulled him close again.

“He’ll pay for this.”

“It’s fine, Imelda.”

“Is it?”

Poisoned.

The word sank in as shock eroded. He’d wanted to go home. Nothing more. He’d only wanted to go home and see his wife, his daughter. There could have been other tours, shorter ones; other shows in Santa Cecilia and the surrounding towns. Cut their overlong tour short, negotiate a compromise, and spend some months at home before setting about whatever they’d agreed to.

Murdered.

Not by a stranger out for whatever money and valuables he could scavenge, but by the man who’d watched him lift a guitar for the first time. The man who’d pushed and pulled until he got on that train and then used every trick he had to keep him from boarding another back home.

He’d purchased a train ticket and paid with his life.

“You’ve seen him, Héctor.” Her voice was still soft, but sharper than it had been. “You’ve seen more of him than I have. They _adore_ him, and I…”

She paused, biting her lip. Tears glimmered in her eyes. He’d seen them glistening on her cheeks, felt them as they fell, and she still had more tears to shed for him.

He wanted her to go. He wanted to go with her, to stay with her as she vented her fury, to add his own to the pyre. The word _murdered_ circled his mind, bringing a rage so hot he could almost taste it. Only one thing held him back.

“You can still die, Imelda.”

******

Shantytown did not begin where the city ended, not precisely. A set of stairs—two, if you counted the rickety wooden ones built on top of the stone—separated the shanties from the rest of the city, but the city ended even before that. A wide stretch of cobblestone gave way to stone, which gave way to stairs leading to Shantytown. Structures littered the stone plain—a crumbling house here, a dilapidated bungalow there. Some enterprising soul had built a tiny shelter onto a wider step, although the door stood open and no light shone from within.

But those were the structures closest to the actual _town._ There were others scattered across the space between city and water, but unlike the odd few near the staircase, there were no lights in any of these. Windows were simply dark or missing entirely; some doors listed on their hinges. Balcony railings and walls alike were partially collapsed. Traditional decay involving mold and parasites was not a danger in the Land of the Dead, but things still crumbled if left forgotten.

Not everything crumbled, though. Some things stood. Not in any desirable condition, but perfect for certain purposes. One in particular had caught his eye, chosen less for any aesthetic appeal and more for its strong walls, its functioning door, its sweeping staircases and high ledges. But that was some distance away. Nearer, far nearer, were the tools Raúl had brought along for the job.

******

Anger flared, but he was right. The only beating heart in the Land of the Dead could be stopped easily, too easily, by a man who would most likely find killing a woman he’d barely tolerated to be far easier than it had been to kill his brother.

Héctor gazed at her a long minute. His eyes—Dios mio, they were exactly the same as she remembered. There was sorrow there, and fear, but fury too. 

Imelda traced his cheekbone. The shape of it was the same, and in her calcified hand the sensation wasn’t as jarring as she’d expected. She wanted to hold him close again, feel his arms around her, stay until sunrise forced her to seek some means of going home. She had never forgotten the sensation of having him near, but she had recoiled from memories of how _right_ it felt, how right it made the world feel.

There was a reason why she had spent the better part of twenty-one years pushing those thoughts away, and that reason walked streets lined with admirers and passed beneath murals where his likeness cradled a stolen guitar.

“What about the police?” Héctor said.

“What about them?”

“I’m sure they’d want to know. I’ve heard it happen before—people getting arrested for things they did while alive. Murder, I mean.”

Imelda turned it over. The thought of Ernesto’s smug grin fading, of him led away in cuffs, was a good one. He would protest, of course, but provided the evidence contained in the songbook and Héctor’s testimony was convincing enough, those protests would fall on deaf ears.

Then she looked to Héctor again. She didn’t know what had been done to him during that first visit to Ernesto. She didn’t know what others had said when he tried to claim the songs he wrote as his own or how far he traveled for work or what he’d done— _Dios mio_ —what he’d done year after year when agent after agent turned him away at the bridge.

She only knew what she saw, and she saw her husband in threadbare clothes and tattered shoes, crumpled on a dirty floor beneath a roof that wouldn’t keep out a stiff breeze.

Compared to what Ernesto deserved, prison would be a reward. 

She thought of him pouting in a cell as the years of a too-short sentence ticked away. 

She thought of Coco staring out the window, gazing off down the road in search of a mamá who would not, could not, come home. 

“I suppose the police will do.”

Héctor’s smile was small and faint, but no less amused. He started to his feet; Imelda did the same, but he stood first and offered his hand. There was no reason for him to offer, and no point in taking it. She had stood on her own for twenty-one years.

She took his hand anyway.

******

They had to leave Shantytown before sunrise. 

Raúl resisted the urge to pace. It wasn’t that he had ever considered himself a patient man; rather, many things he did required patience and so he had adopted the virtue as his own. But if given the choice between taking care of business immediately and waiting another hour, he would choose the former—though he didn’t know of anyone who wouldn’t.

The ancient steps afforded him easiest access to the couple, but he’d chosen a spot behind a vacant structure some meters back. Shantytown’s music did not reach him there; it usually disappeared somewhere on the steps or just before, depending on who had decided to sing and which level of volume they preferred that evening. A shame, as Raúl had always enjoyed Gaspar’s renditions of de la Cruz favorites.

It was never completely silent in the Land of the Dead, but some places were quieter than others. This collection of abandoned and half-abandoned buildings, and similar collections near other places where the near-forgotten dwelled, was the closest to noiseless Raúl had yet seen. So when the boards making up the wooden stairs rattled, he tensed, and inched ahead for a closer look.

They walked up the steps close together, though he couldn’t tell if they walked hand in hand. The woman had her hair covered with a dirty, tattered cloth; the man wore a mariachi suit somewhere between pink and red. Their steps were quick, and although Raúl heard voices, he only made out a handful of words over the racket of the stairs. _Station_ was one; _cempasúchil_ was another. But it was the word _police_ that told him everything. Not only did they know, but their apparent quest for aid from law enforcement confirmed what Raúl had already guessed, so far as his employer’s past went.  

And unlike Raúl, they _were_ inclined to condemn. Which was understandable, but also the reason for Raúl’s presence.

The pair had fallen into silence by the time they reached Raúl’s hiding place. His grip tightened on the knife as their footsteps slapped against stone, crunched against gravel. He peered around the corner.

Not close enough.

Closer.

There.

Neither expected him, and neither was looking in his direction when he sprung out. In seconds, he had her in his grip, pinning her hands to her sides with one arm, pressing the knife to her throat with the other.

“Get—“ he began, but she drove her shoe into the ground repeatedly, trying to find his foot. Raúl rolled his eyes, spaced his legs further apart, and pressed the knife closer.

******

The knife pressed harder, warning away Imelda’s cry for help, cutting off the same from Héctor.  

There was no room for doubt as to who had sent this man. Nor was there time to wonder why she hadn’t anticipated it. She could only think frantically through her options and dismiss those that would bring the knife to break her skin.

The list was long.

The attacker’s head nodded toward her right. “Get in that trunk.”

Imelda followed Héctor’s wide-eyed gaze as best she could. A large wooden clothes chest sat at the corner of her vision. In the darkness, she couldn’t make out a lock or anyone waiting to keep it closed; though if someone else lurked, it seemed more likely they would simply force Héctor into the trunk rather than wait for him to climb in on his own.

His gaze moved back to the attacker. She caught it and mouthed _Go._

He took a single, cautious step backward, lifted his foot for another.

Her breath caught at a sharp sting on her neck as Héctor cried out, moved a few steps closer before the knife shifted, ever so slightly, in warning. 

“I _said_ get in the trunk.”  

_Go,_ Imelda mouthed again. _Police._

Héctor glanced to the right, back toward the shanties, and then to her again. His next step carried him toward the trunk.

Imelda tried to breathe steady. There was nothing else for Héctor to do. No other choice for him to make. He could do as he was told, or watch more blood spill.

Tiny bells jingled as he opened the lid.

No choice. He had no choice.

The sound accompanied the hollow slam of the lid’s closure. A few seconds passed in silence.

There was nothing else he could do. Nothing else she could do.

“If I hear those bells again,” the attacker said, raising his voice only slightly, “you’ll hear her scream.”

The knife did not move from her throat as the attacker tugged her backward, toward something she could not see.


	12. Part Twelve

_“Nothing’s gone wrong yet. Put Colima there.”_

It was an old joke among photo agents. Every Día de los Murertos, something went wrong. That something was often small—a misprint that at worst caused a photo to be filed among those of a different family, or a missed detail in the notes field of a photo. The worst Domingo Almarza had yet seen occurred in 1932, when the notes for four different women scattered between two towns were scrambled, causing all four families to wait meters from the bridge while border and photo agents sorted the chaos. The women had used the lost time to kindle a friendship, but supervisors still brought up the incident as a sobering reminder, and photo agents still joked that ay, if only someone had intentionally listed the wrong state, maybe the mix-up wouldn’t have happened.

It was only a joke, of course, one laced in superstition no one adhered to. No intentional mistake could prevent an unintentional one. Claiming the Granado family came from Colima rather than Oaxaca would have potentially left Domingo with two disasters to sort out—a family’s documents sent to the wrong bridge, and a living woman cursed to walk the Land of the Dead until she found a blessing or the sun rose, whichever came first.

But as he stood in the station watching blue uniforms swirl through the crowd as yet another officer stayed nearby and took notes, the old joke sounded more like advice he should have taken.

Nothing required him to stay with Imelda Rivera’s abuela—also la Señora Rivera, incidentally, though her given name was Antonia. She was not the only deceased relative led back to the Land of the Dead in hopes of bestowing their blessing; Muñoz had brought one of la Señora Rivera’s tías, Gallegos had found her parents, Vera had returned with a tío and a handful of others. Their names had been spoken, but Domingo couldn’t recall them. The introductions had happened so quickly, and there had been so many other things to hear at the time, but he should have remembered.

“You’re absolutely _certain_ she wouldn’t have gone after her husband, Señora?” Officer Cáraves said.

“ _Former_ husband,” Antonia snapped. “As I’ve told you before, he left her.”

Cáraves was one of those officers who had resumed police work after death, rather than taking the opportunity to learn a new trade; and that career had left him with the unparalleled ability to maintain a straight face. The most impressive display occurred back in 1937, when a man huffed and puffed and demanded to know why such a modern station lacked even a single public restroom. _“I know he just died,”_ Cáraves had said later, _“but you’d think he would have caught on.”_

Domingo had little idea what Cáraves might have concealed beneath that mask of professional interest, but considering Antonia had made the same point no fewer than four times without a mistake to prompt her, his patience had to be eroding.

“Perdóname,” Cáraves said, though whether in response to Antonia’s correction or because of the assistant hurrying toward them, Domingo couldn’t be sure. Cáraves exchanged a few words, accepted a sheet of paper, and turned back. “It seems,” he said, more to Domingo than Antonia, “that la Señora Rivera demanded her… _former_ husband’s paperwork before leaving the station.”

Antonia frowned.

“I take it she didn’t know he’d died?”

“No,” she said slowly. “None of us did.”

“He didn’t try to contact you after his death?”

“He _left,_ ” she said. “That’s all we know.”

“Well, whatever she saw on his paperwork caused her to leave the station,” Cáraves went on, handing the page to her.

Domingo peered over her shoulder—not enough to be impolite, but enough to see what she’d been given. The name _Héctor Rivera_ adorned the top of the page. Down a few spaces was written _December 7, 1921._ His date of death.

Héctor Rivera. The woman who had threatened him with a boot, repeatedly demanded his badge, and asked question after question of a job she hadn’t known existed, had married a man whose impersonation of a photo agent nearly led to a complete audit of their practices—not days after the fact, but then and there, thanks to Rivera’s convincing performance and stunningly accurate knowledge of what the job entailed.

Domingo would never say it within earshot of his supervisor, but were Rivera capable of crossing the bridge, he would at least give the man an interview.

Antonia read the year aloud, slowly, as if expecting it to change with scrutiny, and lowered it with a frown.

“You weren’t aware, either?”

“No.” Shock faded in seconds, and she handed the paper back to Cáraves. “This changes nothing. He _never_ tried to find us. Never.”

“Do you have any idea why, Señora?”

A small, mirthless smile quirked her mouth. “He _left_ my granddaughter. Only a fool wouldn’t avoid her family after that.”

*******

“Do you remember what was said during their argument?”

“She didn’t know her husband had died, and thought el Señor de la Cruz should have told her. He claimed he didn’t know.”

The border agent, a young woman named Consuela Ibáñez, was good at summing things up, nice and succinctly—a good skill for a job requiring condensed explanations. Gregorio Peralta needed details. “Why did she think he would have known?”

“They were close—her husband and el Señor de la Cruz. Or that’s what she said. She—she talked like they were. Called him—her husband— _your brother._ ”

“How did he react to this?”

“He didn’t say she was lying. Or act like she was. Just….went along with it.”

Gregorio nodded. So Ernesto de la Cruz had concealed the existence of a close friend throughout his decades-long career. Interesting, but nothing about it suggested a reason as to why la Señora Rivera might run off into the city after demanding her deceased husband’s paperwork. “But he maintained he knew nothing of Héctor Rivera’s death.”

“He said he left in the middle of the night. No suitcase—she mentioned that specifically.”

“A man wanders off into Mexico City in the dead of night without additional clothes or money.”

A small frown crossed Consuela’s face; evidently, she hadn’t given the story much consideration. “That’s what he said. I—I didn’t think of it _too_ much.”

“Ernesto de la Cruz _has_ been rather popular these past few months.”

“And he knew _Héctor Rivera_.”

Gregorio sighed. Whispered gushing over el Señor Rivera’s latest bridge-crossing scheme was as much a tradition among border agents as jokes about intentional mistakes fulfilling some sort of unseen quota was among photo agents. “Señorita, he is _not_ some kind of celebrity.”

“I know.” There was an unspoken _but_ in her words, but she didn’t finish her thought.

“Did la Señora Rivera believe him, or seem to?”

“No.” Consuela’s answer was quick. “I don’t think she believed him at all.”

*******

Among those in the station privy to details of the Rivera case, two theories prevailed.

The first, formed by officers who had interviewed Imelda Rivera’s abuela, tío, parents, two tías, and primo who had died young, held that somewhere within her conversation with el Señor de la Cruz, he had mentioned the unfinished tower and mansion he already called home. Once she learned the date of her former husband’s death, that unwelcome surprise had sent her across the city in search of said former husband’s apparent friend, with designs on dragging the full truth out of him.

The second, put forth by Gregorio Peralta, the officer who had interviewed la Señorita Ibáñez, agreed that Ernesto de la Cruz had simply not convinced her that her husband had wandered off in the dead of night. According to this theory, however, la Señora Rivera did not trust her former husband’s friend to give her the truth. As he was the one who had died, Héctor Rivera would be able to tell her what happened the night of his death; she might not believe everything he said, and he might not tell her the whole truth, but she would be able to sift through each account and form a clearer picture of what had happened.

Domingo wasn’t certain which theory he embraced. Antonia Rivera had insisted that her granddaughter would not run after her former husband. _“She’s put him in her past, where he belongs,”_ she’d said. _“She will_ not _chase after him now, no matter what you think he knows. My Imelda has more sense than that.”_

He was not inclined to disbelieve a woman’s abuela, or any abuela for that matter. And yet Officer Peralta’s account, of a border agent struck by a widow’s fury, by the contempt with which she regarded the man claiming to have been abandoned by his brother—that was convincing, too.

“How is she going to find him?” Antonia had stood with hands on hips, staring Peralta down. “ _We_ don’t know where that worthless músico lives; how do you expect a _living woman_ to find him in _one_ night?”

“She _did_ know a few of his prior locations, Señora,” Peralta had said. “It’s not ridiculous to think she might have found him.”

“I thought you said he walked away from the bridge.”

“If they were searching for each other, it’s possible they found each other.”

“And where are they now? Do you have _any idea_ how big this city is?”

“I’ve patrolled four separate districts, Señora.”

“Don’t sass me.”

Peralta had sighed. “Señora, we only want to cover as much ground as possible. Since there’s a chance she followed her former husband, we want to make sure there’s a chance she’s found along that route.”

“I still say she wouldn’t have done it,” she’d said. Domingo had remembered her insistence that her Imelda hadn’t listened to music for over twenty years, had sold her phonograph and anything else that reminded her of it, and wouldn’t so much as allow music _near_ her home—so why on earth would she steal a _songbook,_ of all things? He had nearly reminded her of it, and of the fact her Imelda had admitted to stealing it outright, but it was best to let the argument die there.

Now, as he watched deceased Riveras pair off with police officers to seek out their living relative, Domingo still wasn’t certain which theory he favored. No one in the police department had come down firmly on either side yet, either, and so the plan accounted for both.

“You’re sure we’ll find her by sunrise?” her Tío Guillermo asked.

“We’re doing all we can,” Peralta said, handing him three more cempasúchil petals.

Guillermo’s mouth drew into a line. It wasn’t the answer he’d sought—it wasn’t much of an answer at all—but Peralta had never been one to offer false hope.

Minutes later, all seven Riveras had left the station, each beside an officer. Some fanned out in the general direction of Ernesto de la Cruz’s tower; others drifted toward Shantytown. Seven of her family, cempasúchil in hand, ready to bestow their blessing and send her home.

Seven family members. Had Imelda Rivera remained by the bridge or moved to an office somewhere in the building, the number would have seemed close to overwhelming. But with her adrift somewhere in the city, seven people seemed like nothing at all.

*******

Flesh and blood outweighed bone.

This was simply a fact, and an obvious one at that. Imelda wasn’t certain by how much she outweighed her attacker—her arms were bone below the elbow and she wouldn’t be surprised if the curse had done more damage she hadn’t seen—but she thought that if she only stood still, if she refused to move, he might have no means of forcing her along.

No means, that is, except the knife.

Hesitant as his steps were, he had not removed the knife from her throat. Stinging pain reminded her that he would not hesitate to use it, though if he hadn’t done so yet, perhaps he wouldn’t do so _immediately._ He was waiting for something, some signal or sign, and if she stopped in her tracks, she might be able to break his grip and run.

She didn’t stop, but she did hesitate before the next step. The knife shifted, moving closer to her jugular.

“You want to go home, don’t you?”

Imelda gritted her teeth. Were she feeling bolder, she might have laughed in his face.

She only knew they reached an abandoned home by the gable that suddenly blocked out the sky, splintering wood just barely visible in the darkness. The attacker drove his foot into a door once, twice. It creaked open, and he pulled her through.

Near-darkness greeted her, broken only by flickering light from a lantern resting on a trunk shoved against a wall. There were shadows on that trunk, but Imelda’s attention was drawn first to the tall man wrapped in a dark coat, hood pulled over his features. She knew his identity even with his back to her.

_Ernesto. How thoughtful of you to join us._ She nearly said it, dripping with all the sarcasm she could muster, but the trunk, and the shadows upon it, gave her pause. One appeared to be a pile of soft things—strips of cloth, perhaps, or one long length of it. The other, positioned further from the lantern, was more difficult to make out, but she could tell it was partly flat, partly raised, one side sloping down opposite the mostly straight edge of the other.

A knife.

The attacker’s voice came again, louder but still close to her ear. “Want to tie her or gag her first?”

Ernesto turned, and she chose between fighting for her life and begging for it. She took a few frantic glances toward the trunk and around the room, drawing quick and frightened breaths. She wouldn’t glare at him. She couldn’t risk a glare. Rather than answer the question, Ernesto paused.

“Is Héctor in the trunk?”

“Sí. Climbed right in without much of a fight.”

Ernesto regarded her a long moment. The thought of groveling before this coward made her stomach turn, but if it bought her enough time to fight, she would grovel.

“Please,” she whispered. The knife did not threaten to break her skin, so she added another layer of pleading to her voice. “ _Por favor,_ Ernesto.”

Seconds passed. She let her knees sag, biting her lip. She only needed the knife to leave her throat. It might not be enough, but it would give her a chance.

“Take care of Héctor. I’ll bind her.”

“You sure?”

Another long pause. Imelda couldn’t identify the emotion that flickered across his face any more than she could believe her luck.

“Sí.” It came out more sigh than word. “Go.”

Ernesto’s personal murder valet tugged her close. “Bones still break, you know. If you scream, that’s what you’ll hear.”

A rough shove sent her to the floor, which was mostly absent of dust. Grime covered every window she could see, and yet the floor appeared to have been swept, albeit in a hurry. All the better to hide the number of footprints responsible for any bloodstains.

She put a hand to her throat because it was what Ernesto would expect, and was not surprised to see blood staining her calcified fingers. A dull ache had set in where the knife had pressed, but she didn’t know if he expected her to cough.

The door opened and closed. Ernesto turned back to the trunk and lifted a length of cloth.

She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped a shaking arm—she wouldn’t have to fake that, at least—around them.

Ernesto said nothing. She’d thought he would say something, send her off with some twisted toast, but she heard only the soft rustle of cloth.

One foot twitched at the other. Slowly, carefully, she moved her hand toward her loosened boot.

Ernesto took one step, then another, turning from the trunk. She kept her eyes open only slightly, only a slit each, halting her hand’s motion.

He approached her now, stretching a length of cloth between his hands.

Her heart hammered. Seconds. That was what she had. Only seconds to grab her boot and get to her feet.

Ernesto stood over her, a presence she felt more than saw.

Her hand grasped leather.


	13. Part Thirteen

Antonia Rivera had met Héctor, but Héctor had never made her acquaintance.

She’d seen him on a bare handful of occasions, each Día de los Muertos he’d remained with the family. A letter had explained his presence in 1918, where he and Imelda alternated holding a daughter born seven months after their wedding. The dates of both wedding and birth had been presented in that letter, without comment or elaboration, but said plenty on their own.

He hadn’t dreaded his turn holding little Coco. That had always stuck in Antonia’s mind. When Imelda placed their daughter in his arms, he’d smiled as though offered an armful of gold; and when Imelda held her, he’d hovered close, smiling and cooing and laughing in triumph every time he coaxed a grin. Antonia remembered looking down at the dates, at that seven-month gap, and back to the man responsible, gazing at his wife and daughter as though they were the world, thinking perhaps it would work. He was a músico who hadn’t left Santa Cecilia yet, not for any extended length of time, and he apparently had no plans to do so. Perhaps it would work. Perhaps it would last.

Officer Peralta—of _course_ they paired her with the one who tried to sway the whole department to follow a useless lead, _of course they did_ —had asked her once and only once if she had any ideas as to where Héctor might have gone. Having heard her response, he walked in mostly silence, only speaking to tell her which way he planned to go or where he planned to search more carefully.

“There isn’t time to look through every doorway.”

“Sí, Señora. I know. I doubt she would have gone into a stranger’s home.”

Antonia wanted to argue, if only to feel she was contributing something of value, but she couldn’t disagree. She could only push feebly against the cold fear nipping at her heels, and the memories tugging at her sleeve.

“Do you honestly think she went after a man who left her?”

“We have to investigate every lead.”

A professional non-answer, not an opinion. It said nothing about what he _thought,_ offered no hints as to how deeply he held to the theory he’d put forward. It was simply a fact, and not one Antonia particularly liked. Peralta, and the rest of the department by extension, had an obligation to find her granddaughter; and when fulfilling that obligation meant pursuing two opposing theories, that was what they would do. Peralta’s opinion had little to do with it. Had he been sent toward that pretentious tower, he would have gone without argument.

There should have been comfort in that. Instead, Antonia thought of the myriad roads and alleys between the station and that músico’s mansion, and how much less ground those sent toward it would cover without the six sent toward Shantytown.

Unless, of course, Imelda had gone in the opposite direction.

******

It happened before Ernesto could finish his thought.

One moment, he stood over Imelda, cloth at the ready, deciding it’d be best to tie her hands first. Then Imelda moved and his head spun on his neck, the room becoming a blur of dim color and a whistle of air.

Another shock of pain caught him in the neck before the blow to his jaw had time to register. By pure instinct he raised arms to protect himself, but the next one hit his hands; sharp pain preceded a hollow clatter some meters away.

The spinning slowed, and only the ache in his neck stifled a yelp. Two of his fingers were gone.

Ernesto tried to call for Raúl, but the pain in his neck reduced his _Ayúdame_ to a breathless _aaaaa._ He stepped back— _his fingers, where on earth were his fingers?_ —and Imelda brushed past him.

The pain in his neck eased, and a second clatter preceded the rejoining of fingers to hand.

He didn’t know why. Dimly, he recalled some acrobats tossing their heads about; but he didn’t pause to wonder or question or even to laugh at the mutual reversal of fortune. Imelda made for the door, and he bounded after.

*******

Héctor’s joy hadn’t dimmed in his second year of fatherhood. It was less exuberant, perhaps, but that warmth was still present, shining through each smile he turned on his daughter, each word he spoke to his wife. And Imelda returned it. She could be smiling when he looked at her and her smile would soften further. If she frowned, the difference was even more pronounced. Sometimes her smile took a bit of coaxing, but it nearly always surfaced.  

For all appearances, he had loved her.

And then came Día de Muertos, 1922. The worried looks she had worn when her living family was absent had given way to something deeper, something darker. Anger lurked behind her eyes, smoldering like coals. She smiled, but it rarely reached her eyes; genuine smiles seemed reserved for Coco. But she wasn’t dead inside, not in the slightest. She moved. She spoke. She _did._ But that anger was always there, waiting to be called upon to warm her.

 _You’re absolutely_ certain _he died the year he left?_

The question was at the front of Antonia’s mind, but asking would only waste time. The Department of Family Reunions was quite meticulous about its paperwork, as any government office ought to be. If they said Héctor Rivera, husband to Imelda and father to Socorro, died in 1921, then 1921 was the year he died and no amount of questioning would prove it false.

She simply couldn’t reconcile it with what she’d known.

“Do…” Antonia nearly rescinded the question, decided she needed to know, and plunged ahead. “Do many people choose not to contact a spouse’s family after death?”

“You’d have to ask the Department of Family Reunions how often it happens, but it happens.”

“Why?”

Peralta hesitated. Perhaps she’d asked for information he wasn’t allowed to share. “If neither side knew the other well, I suppose that could affect the final decision.”

He sounded more thoughtful than uncertain. Further answers would be forthcoming. Antonia nearly told him they wouldn’t be needed, but held her silence.

“If a death is very sudden,” Peralta continued, “they might not think to alert in-laws right away.” 

Food poisoning. Not a pleasant cause of death, but not a speedy one, either. Héctor could have spent days in bed as his stomach tried in vain to rid itself of whatever contaminant he’d been fool enough to ingest. In either case, he would have had time to write his wife, to warn her that he might not return home. When death arrived, it would have been an expected visitor—not welcome, but expected. Even if he hadn’t recalled his wife’s family while gathering his thoughts, he ought to have remembered them hours or days or weeks later.

Peralta led her down a narrower street bearing fewer lights, fewer people. Up ahead, the lights disappeared altogether, forming a wide plain that later gave way to a deeper darkness. Shantytown wasn’t far.

********

There were rocks in the trunk.

Not too many. Not enough that Héctor didn’t fit. But a sizable stone occupied the first corner his hand wandered to upon closing the lid; another sat adjacent and he felt two more at his feet. The chest bore enough metal reinforcement to at least make floating difficult, but the rocks would eliminate that possibility. In all likelihood, more would be tied to the bottom or sides.

_“If I hear those bells again, you’ll hear her scream.”_

Despite the rocks, despite the trunk and the both of them together, that alone had prevented Héctor from testing the lid and the claim. The soft click of an automatic lock had not followed him inside, and the bells likely would have masked such a noise, but Imelda had been led away with a knife to her throat.

There was no way to tell how much time passed, but Héctor only knew it passed in silence. Everything within him screamed to try standing, to try throwing open the lid, but he remained still. He couldn’t move. Not now. Not when Imelda still had blood to be spilled, a heart to be stopped.

He wasn’t certain if he heard them at first, but soon he could not deny it: Footsteps approached him. They were soft, and muffled by the trunk, but they were approaching.

Imelda’s attacker.

 _If I hear those bells again._ Perhaps the mere act of pushing at the locked lid would have been enough to disturb the bells, but then again, if he’d felt the need to say it, that _should_ have meant he feared escape. It was more likely he’d make threats against an escape that stood a chance of success than against the mere thought of it.

The footsteps halted.

Moments. Seconds. That was what he had. Stay in the trunk, learn whether or not it was locked too late to do anything but wait to be dropped in the lake—or try something else and risk more than his own safety.

Imelda.

He didn’t know where she was. He didn’t know how much longer she had. He only knew that escape might be a costly gamble, but she stood a better chance of survival with someone else at her side—and if he were to try, he had to try now, when she had perhaps one assailant to face rather than two.

A muffled half-footstep approached the trunk. Héctor’s wrapped his hand around a rock.  

*******

Raúl knew better than to approach Héctor Rivera with anything close to his guard down. This wasn’t a man who had fooled the border agents, or a man whose loco schemes had gotten him anywhere near the bridge. No, he was something more dangerous than either of those: a man willing to try _anything,_ no matter how ludicrous or ill-advised, that might take him the tiniest step closer to his goal.

So when he reached the trunk, he paused. A knife wouldn’t do him much good against a dead man, so he’d sheathed it and taken up a crowbar brought from the mansion. Nothing fancy, nothing elaborate, but it would do the job. And once there were no witnesses to interview, the police stood little chance of tracing the tool to the most visible and well-known construction site in the Land of the Dead.

Not a stir came from the trunk. Either the threats to his wife had made him unusually compliant, or he had found an alternate use for the rocks. Raúl took one step forward, then another half-step.

No noise came from the trunk, none he could hear. There had been no bells then, and there were no bells now.

Come on, he thought. Get it over with.

Raúl took the key from his pocket, let it clink against another.

The lid burst open, and Raúl barely jumped back in time to save his head from that rock. He didn’t swing with the crowbar—not yet.

Héctor, by contrast, leaped out of the trunk, lunging forward and taking a swipe that went wide and caused him to stumble forward when Raúl jumped to the side, using the opportunity to swing with the crowbar.

Dios, he was fast.

A strong blow to the head would incapacitate him—likely not for long, as the memories tying him to life would heal injuries in a matter of minutes—but Héctor seemed prepared for that, and willing to cause the same.

There was more than one solution. There always was, but Héctor gave him little time to think of them. So, when he lunged again, Raúl dodged, spun, and struck.

The first blow knocked him to the ground. He tried to scramble to his feet, but Raúl brought the crowbar crashing onto his leg.

******

Scant meters from the door, Ernesto seized her by the arm.

Imelda swung her shoe at his hand, trying to break his grip or break his arm off, but he held firm through the first blow and only loosened his hold at the second. She brought her shoe up for another blow, but Ernesto tightened his hold and, without taking his eyes from her for one moment, called out.

“¡Raúl! ¡Ayúdame!”  

She’d thought her boot had robbed him of speech, for a few minutes if nothing else, but the sound of his voice made her grit her teeth.

He had Héctor in a trunk.

He had her all but trapped in a derelict structure with a knife and another trunk.

And here he was, calling for help.

Imelda drove her boot into his hand again and again, putting as much force as she could muster into each blow. He yelped, reaching for her with his free hand; she swatted it away with another blow, taking the chance to aim for his head.

Héctor’s scream of pain cut through.

******

Imelda’s hesitation lasted only seconds, only long enough for the rage and hatred twisting her features to bleed into fear. Only long enough for the strength to leave her arm dangling before striking the next blow. And in that moment, as in all those prior to it, Ernesto had a choice.

They needed her unconscious. If that part of the plan had been in question, her success in knocking two fingers off his hand proved it. But where the plan allowed her lack of awareness to be an effect of her death, a necessary delay to mend broken bones and make the transition from life as painless as possible, reality demanded she lose consciousness while she still breathed. Raúl could spill her blood and lock her in the trunk and perform any other task needed to ensure she remained there, but she had nearly made it to the door once. Had it not been for that cry of pain, she likely would have done it twice.

Héctor was taken care of. Raúl would arrive any moment—but it would be a moment too late if Imelda escaped and made her way back into the city. If she was to lose consciousness, it would be Ernesto’s doing.

And the most readily available method was the least pleasant by far.

He had a moment, only a moment, to make a decision. A fraction of the time he’d had before Héctor’s death. 

The decision was easier now. 

******

Antonia didn’t realize how _noisy_ the city was until the silence between it and Shantytown engulfed her.

She heard her own footsteps as she walked along. Not unusual when she was inside, but they were never quite this loud, the sound never quite this intrusive. The crunch of gravel and dirt, the slap of shoes on stone, seemed close to deafening. Little light made it this far from the city, and what light was present was faint, abandoned homes and other structures casting long shadows within it.

Imelda wasn’t here. She couldn’t be here, and she most certainly could _not_ have followed her former husband to this place. And if Héctor lived here….

Well, after what he’d done, it wasn’t undeserved.

She tried to think of something to say, anything that might fill that silence and push her thoughts back. All of the questions she could ask had answers she wasn’t certain she wanted to hear, and all the comments she had would lead to questions she didn’t want to answer. She followed him past the edge of the city, toward a set of steps bordering the edge of the water.

A scream split the night.

Antonia nearly lost her balance, but Peralta snapped to attention, clasping her shoulder for just a second.

“Wait here, Señora.”

She still hadn’t identified the owner of that cry. She hadn’t determined if it were stranger or family or something else entirely. But when your granddaughter was missing and someone was screaming in pain and a police officer told you to stay where you were, there was only one thing to do.

Antonia hurried after Peralta, as fast as she could manage.


	14. Part Fourteen

Gregorio Peralta was not the only officer sent toward Shantytown.

With an uneven number of Riveras, the department had been forced to favor one theory over the other. Four had been paired with officers and sent toward Ernesto de la Cruz’s tower. The remaining three had been sent toward the shanties, told to cover as much ground as three pairs were capable of covering. It was hardly ideal, but the best they could manage with limited resources and a fatal deadline.

Now, as Gregorio ran toward the scream, he could only hope at least one of the other pairs had heard it too.

Other footsteps joined the sound of his own, spaced closer together and a bit slower than his. Imelda, it seemed, was not the only Rivera who refused to heed direct orders in the face of danger. But there was nothing to be done about that now. He could turn and tell her to stay where she was, but anything more forceful would slow progress by minutes, and seconds counted.

And she was a witness. Whatever was about to happen, whatever he was about to find, better he found it with someone able to corroborate the story. 

******

For a moment, Héctor couldn’t think through the pain.

It plowed into him at top speed, overwhelming other senses and sending his mind into a blank. He heard a scream and only dimly registered it as his own.

Awareness returned seconds before the crowbar crashed into his skull.

He rolled out of the way, sending a fresh wave of pain through his leg and narrowly avoiding the blow. Metal cracked against stone with a deep and hollow _clang._

His leg could heal. It _would_ heal, given enough minutes. But he didn’t have minutes. There was only him, the assailant, and that crowbar.

And the trunk. Not a perfect shield, and not a good hiding place at all, but it was solid and it was there. He might not reach it before the crowbar found him again, but it afforded a better chance than remaining in the open. 

The assailant raised the crowbar again, black metal glinting in the dim light. Héctor pulled himself up, on hands and knee, and dragged himself toward the trunk.

*******

This was a mistake.

There was room for no other thought in Ernesto’s head. Only that. Only what felt like the most profound truth ever spoken, screaming through his head the way it had on that morning so long ago, the first morning without Héctor.

_Mistake. Wrong. Go back._

Imelda’s skin was warm. Her pulse quickened beneath his thumb as her wide eyes stared into his. She’d had time for a yelp, nothing more, but it echoed in his mind. Fear and shock all melted together into one small noise that he quickly stifled.

_Mistake. Wrong. Go back._

Unconscious. He only needed her unconscious. Raúl could handle everything else. Raúl could take care of the bit with the knife and the trunk and the broken bones to ensure she remained quiet for as long as possible. Ernesto only needed to help him along. Only needed to keep his hands around her throat until her eyes closed.

_Go back. Go back. Go back._

Her hand clawed at his arm before she realized the futility of it. One foot stomped the floor in a blind search for his. She gasped for breath and got less than she wanted.

The anger in her eyes faded as fear took its place. It wasn’t new—act or not, it had always been present from the moment she sighted that knife—but it was stronger now. Deeper. It hadn’t crossed into hopelessness, but it could. It might. And he would see every second, witness the moment her courage flagged.

_It’s too late to go back._

Héctor was dead. Ernesto had the songs—not the songbook, not anymore, but if Imelda had lied about having it on her person that would change soon enough. He had the songs, and if he wanted to keep them, he had to keep going. Had to watch her eyes for the moment they lost awareness, the second they closed.

Twenty-one years and it was too late to go back.  

*******

Día de Muertos was many things, but _quiet_ was not one of them.

It was simple math. A person might come under stress when out and about, and they might act on that stress or they might not. Whether or not they did, the smallest setback could take on the appearance of a catastrophe, making any solution save for the quickest and most absolute seem like a glass of water tossed on a raging house fire.

On their own, a single person under a large amount of stress was manageable. Help them through, help them calm down, and that was usually the end of it. But when you took that person and multiplied it by the thousands, changing the circumstances of each one’s anxiety just enough to preclude uniform solutions, and placed them all in a line stretching as far as the eye could see with their living familia at the end of it—then, _then_ you knew you were in for quite the night. After resuming police work following his death, Gregorio had learned, and learned quickly, to expect organized chaos, unusual complaints, and fifty different problems that had to be solved immediately at any given moment.

Chasing after an agonized scream in the darkness bordering Shantytown was not one of the things he’d come to expect from the holiday.

The cry lasted long enough for Gregorio to identify a direction to follow, but there was no light guiding him that way, nothing to make it easier to find the source. He moved as quickly as he could regardless, dodging one abandoned home and skirting another.

A hollow _clang_ reverberated through the night, from the same direction the scream had come. Gregorio drew his baton. It might do him some good and it might not, but better to err on the side of caution. If this assailant had a metal weapon—probably a crowbar, or something of similar weight and composition, judging from the sound it had made—better to face them armed than with no weapon at all.

He ducked around an abandoned home, and it didn’t take long to identify the source of the noise: One man stood with crowbar tilted over his shoulder, steps from another dragging himself toward an open trunk, one leg trailing uselessly on the ground. There wasn’t much light, but Gregorio would have recognized Héctor Rivera’s mariachi suit anywhere.

_“Drop the crowbar!”_ Gregorio broke into a run before he finished forming the words. _“I said drop it!”_

******

Imelda’s first instinct was to claw at Ernesto’s hands, his arms, to get him to slacken his grip. The absence of flesh or skin to claw at rendered the attempt useless. Unable to see his feet, she could only stomp blindly and hope she hit something.

It shouldn’t have been so difficult to breathe.

There was a gap between each of his arms, one wide enough to slip hers into. Maybe, if she could manage that, and she could twist her arm through his in just the right way….

His hands shifted, but they didn’t tighten. His eyes did not leave hers. There was no glee in them and nothing approaching it; no trace of a smile tugged at his mouth. He gritted his teeth as she snaked her hand up past his arm.

He didn’t relish the act, but he wasn’t about to let go.

A fog settled in around her thoughts, a fog she’d tried and failed to keep at bay. She had to stay awake, had to escape before darkness claimed her. She had to get to the door and to Héctor.

The fog pressed closer.

_“Drop the crowbar! I said drop it!”_

Imelda knew the voice was salvation in the split second before Ernesto slackened his grip. Not for long. Not enough that he let go. But it was enough for her to draw a breath, to pull away as the fog dissipated.

She wanted to drive her boot into his head, his ribs, his spine. She wanted to snatch up the lantern and smash it against his frame, again and again until he was a pile of bones on the floor, lacking ability or will to re-form. But all she could do, once she’d fallen to her knees, was cough.

The door. It was further than it should have been, further than she needed it to be, but she gasped a breath and turned toward it.

******

Raúl didn’t know what the police officer was doing there in the stretch of nothing before Shantytown. He didn’t need to. All he needed to know was that he’d been seen.

There was a woman with the officer, small but moving quickly, lacking any sort of uniform. Not an officer, though he didn’t have time to wonder why a civilian would’ve followed a police officer to Shantytown in search of a woman they didn’t know was there.

There were four witnesses now, one of them an officer. The plan accounted for two. Perhaps Raúl could have found a way to make three civilians and one officer vanish, but he didn’t have time to sort out the particulars or even adjust the plan in any meaningful way.

If one officer was there, that could mean nothing more than the obvious, or it could mean backup was soon to follow. The crowbar in his hand, the trunk, the rocks—none of it left any ambiguity as to what he’d intended to do to the man dragging his fractured leg across the stone, moving quickly considering the circumstances, but not rapidly by any means.

Escape was the superior option by far. Escape by way of a distraction was even better. Perhaps Héctor’s injured leg would provide that, but Raúl didn’t like to take chances. 

*******

The man with the crowbar was quicker than Gregorio had estimated.

With his injured leg, Héctor hadn’t been moving terribly fast, especially with the pain to slow him down. But he’d been moving, and in that brief moment of distraction on the part of his assailant, he’d made it a few steps closer to the trunk and the makeshift shelter it afforded.

Then, before Gregorio could close the gap between them, the assailant brought his crowbar down on Héctor’s foot.

It was a distraction. A crude, bald-faced distraction meant to aid in his escape and divert attention from the path he chose and the fact he took the crowbar along. All this was as obvious as the fractures in Héctor’s bones, and Gregorio had to swallow a knot of anger as he knelt beside the injured man.

“Dios mio.” Antonia had come to a halt close by. She hadn’t run after the attacker on her own, and Gregorio was not about to send an unarmed civilian on a pursuit to an unknown destination. 

“¿Estás bien, amigo?”

“Imelda.” Héctor gasped the name by way of an answer, face twisting in pain. “He—they have Imelda.”

A jolt went through him. “Where?”

Héctor shook his head, but Gregorio caught sight of the assailant’s path just before he skirted an abandoned home and then disappeared behind it. Like all others there, the windows were coated in a thick layer of grime, but something flickered in this one, something faint and just barely visible, but he saw it nonetheless.

A light.

********

Imelda should have been able to reach the door. Despite the pain in her throat and the weakness in her limbs, she should have been able to at least crawl to safety, if not walk to it. Ernesto had at least one new witness to contend with; she had only him and the distraction of a new wrinkle in his plan.

A hand seized her arm, and she didn’t know if anyone aside from Ernesto heard the small yelp she managed to choke out.

The back door opened and closed. Over the sound of her beating heart, over the sound of Raúl’s footsteps on the floor and the rustle of cloth as Ernesto hauled her to her feet, she thought she heard a noise from outside.

“We need to get out of here,” Ernesto said.

Raúl nodded, but said nothing. He held a crowbar, an answer to what had caused Héctor to cry out, and a question Imelda would rather not have answered. She tried to tug herself free, but Ernesto pulled her to him, each hand gripping one of her arms. She tried again.

Raúl stepped forward.

The front door burst open.

*******

For the first second after opening the door, Gregorio’s mind couldn’t process what his eyes saw.

The light within the abandoned house was dim, cast from a single lantern set atop a trunk not unlike the one Héctor had tried and failed to crawl toward. Some distance away stood Ernesto de la Cruz, the most celebrated man in the Land of the Dead since his arrival, Imelda Rivera caught in his grip. The man who had left Héctor Rivera with two painful fractures stood nearby, crowbar in his hands. A small, dark line marked Imelda’s neck, blurred where the blood had been disturbed. A length of cloth lay on the strangely clean floor, with more piled on the trunk beside a knife.  

It was not the best time. It was not the best place. But the thought sprang to mind of gossip, both verbal and written, circulated prior to this night, all of it begging the answer to a single question: _What will Ernesto de la Cruz be doing on Día de los Muertos?_

Gregorio didn’t know how Imelda had gotten there, or why el Señor del a Cruz had followed, or why, _why_ he’d deemed all of this necessary. He only knew the músico had searched for and found the _only_ living woman in the Land of the Dead—and he’d prepared at least three different methods of forcing her to stay.

Antonia, who had fallen behind but not by much, appeared beside him, halted, and loosed a word he would have avoided in her presence. She didn’t shout or charge forward or demand her granddaughter’s safety—not yet, at any rate. She saw the crowbar, the short distance between it and her granddaughter, how little it would take to close that gap.

“Backup will be here any minute,” Gregorio snapped, brandishing his baton. He didn’t know whether or not the statement was true, but he couldn’t for one moment act as if it might be a lie. “Drop the weapon and let her go.”

There was no guarantee it would work. Not everyone fell for a bluff like that, and he stood his ground for a long minute. Any moment now one or the other would point out the lack of footsteps or shouts or other signs of aid arriving and both would gain enough confidence from the observation to test Gregorio’s claim.

Ernesto de la Cruz flicked a glance toward the back of the house—toward a door. It wasn’t surrender, not quite, but it was a step toward it.

Gregorio took a step of his own—two, in fact. There was no knife to Imelda’s throat. The crowbar was a threat and required caution, but he could dare a small foray into enemy territory. A small demonstration of the confidence he showed more than felt. “I _said,_ drop the weapon and let her go.”

Ernesto didn’t release Imelda so much as shove her forward, seconds before he bolted for the back door.


	15. Part Fifteen

Once Ernesto fled, Raúl followed, dropping the crowbar on his way. The officer did not give chase, but hurried to the door the moment they’d passed through, watching their direction.

Abuelita was on the floor in an instant, gathering Imelda into her arms. Whether it was the gentleness of her touch or the familiarity of it or the simple fact she was _there_ and Ernesto wasn’t _,_ Imelda didn’t know, but tears sprang to her eyes. It was over, Ernesto was gone and she was alive, and she only wanted to weep.

“Shh.” Abuelita whispered it again and again, the way she had soothed Imelda when she was small. “Shh, I’m here, mija.”

Imelda didn’t ask why she was there. She didn’t need to. Abuelita was there and for now, it was enough.

The officer knelt beside them, caught Imelda’s attention with a hand on her shoulder. “¿Estás bien?”

He had to know the answer was closer to _no_ than to _sí,_ but she was alive. She nodded, saw him begin to stand, and touched his arm. “Héctor?”

Abuelita’s hands pressed against her back, though Imelda couldn’t be certain whether it came from the name she’d spent twenty years avoiding or from the strained whisper that carried it.

The officer dipped his head in understanding. “I’m going to bring him inside. Shout if el Señor de la Cruz and his accomplice return,” he added, mostly to Abuelita.

“If either one shows his face again,” Abuelita said, “I won’t be the one screaming for help.”

“Ay, Señora, don’t tell _me_ that.” The officer stood and jogged out the front door. His gaze never once strayed toward the abandoned crowbar; it remained within a few steps of Abuelita’s reach.

She had questions. Imelda felt them in the tension she carried, in the way her hands flattened against her back before moving up to brush over her hair. But she didn’t voice a single one of them. As much as Imelda longed to pour out everything that had happened that night, her aching throat demanded she speak as little as possible.

Minutes later, the door thudded softly against the wall. Imelda’s heart leaped and her stomach did a twist.

“I—Imelda?”

Abuelita’s embrace tightened—not enough to keep her from pulling away, but enough to tell her she didn’t quite approve of the idea. Imelda slipped free and set about getting to her feet, a process that would have been easier had there been a chair or some other piece of furniture for her to grab hold of. Once she’d gotten turned around, she nearly swayed.

That Héctor stood in the doorway was primarily the officer’s doing. One leg trailed limply behind him, the foot twisted; he gave a small cry as the officer eased him onto the floor, stretching the injured leg in front of him, resting his back against the wall. He sat there a moment, eyes closed, face drawn in pain and half a dozen other things Imelda felt but hadn’t the energy to name.

A part of her wanted to run to him, but instead she walked, slowly, and sank to the floor. Héctor opened his eyes and regarded her a long moment. Weariness covered every bit of his face; it held his limbs down and kept him where he was.  

With scarcely a thought, and no hesitation to speak of, Imelda wrapped her arms around him. She’d pinned one arm to his side, but he covered her clasped hands with one of his own. 

“You’re alive,” he whispered. “Gracias a Dios, you’re alive.”

He said it with a smile, tired but grateful as anything, and it hit her like a blow. She was alive.

He wasn’t.

He’d been rescued from that trunk, brought to relative safety with a fractured leg and a broken foot but still more or less in one piece. Even if the promised backup remained farther than the officer had let on, they would work to ensure Héctor’s safety once they arrived. He was there beside her, gazing at her with the same eyes and the same smile and the same warmth she remembered, but nothing she or the police or Abuelita or anyone else could do would allow her to bring him home. She could sit beside him until the sun rose, could listen to his voice and hold him as long as she remained at his side, but she would return and he would remain. 

A different sort of pain settled in her aching throat.

“Imelda? Are you—“

She drew a long, ragged gasp, and sobbed into his shoulder.

******

Imelda didn’t know how long it was before her sobs gave way to something quieter. She only knew that when they did, she became aware of voices and footsteps outside, of Abuelita’s hand on her shoulder and Héctor’s arms wrapped around her. She looked, and found him kneeling now, holding her close.

He must have seen her curious frown, because he gave her a tired smile. “Bones can heal faster here.”

Imelda thought through the numbness that this, at least, was one thing Ernesto had done that wouldn’t last. One atrocity that wouldn’t stick.

The officer had walked out some minutes prior; Imelda assumed it had something to do with the voices and footsteps outside, but only now did she wonder. He appeared in the doorway soon after, a second officer beside him. Abuelita let out a sigh of relief.

“I thought you were lying about backup.”

The officer gave a weary smile. “I am very glad to learn I wasn’t.”

Imelda sat up, reluctantly breaking Héctor’s embrace, as the second officer stepped inside, taking a few glances around the room. She swallowed the knot in her throat. “Ernesto?”

“We’ve sent for more officers,” the first one said. “Once they arrive, we’ll start a search—after we’ve sent you home.”

They wanted to send her back to her family, away from the brewing investigation—taking whatever testimony she might provide with her. Imelda shook her head, causing the two officers to trade glances.

“There’s only a few hours until sunrise, Señora, and you don’t seem to be in the best condition to give a statement…”

Imelda rolled her eyes and pantomimed scratching a pen across a page.

The first officer took a small and narrow notepad from his belt. He flipped to the last few empty pages and took a long look at the knife and the cloth, the trunk resting on the freshly swept floor, the cut on her throat where bruises would almost certainly soon appear. He looked again at how few pages sat before the end of the notepad. The two of them traded glances.

******

Imelda’s written statement filled multiple pages, and she continued to write. Héctor wasn’t certain where the officers had gotten the paper or how they’d found it so quickly, but he suspected it might be a donation from someone among the throng of people gathering outside, attracted by the growing commotion.

There were familiar faces in that crowd. From what Héctor could gather, someone in Shantytown had been close enough to the stairs to hear his cry of pain and, after a brief pause to gather reinforcements, had surged up the steps as quickly as possible, though too late to alter the course of events. Héctor had spoken to none of them, having been pulled aside to give a statement of his own. It would have felt like a waste of time, had the police not set out in search of Ernesto and Raúl the moment they had enough officers.

Imelda’s abuela—he still wasn’t certain if she was Señora Rivera or Mamá Antonia to him—nearly marched out the door the moment Imelda sat down with a pen, but Peralta stopped her.

“We still need a statement from you, Señora.”

“They tried to murder my granddaughter. There. You have my statement.” She managed a few more steps before Peralta sighed.

“A more detailed statement, por favor.”

She whirled. “How many more details do you _need_? You were there.”

“We need testimony from all witnesses.” Before she could object, he plunged ahead. “We have officers searching for them both, Señora.”

“And how long will it take to find them? Can you tell me that?”

“Not nearly as long as it will take you on your own.”

Her gaze strayed to the abandoned crowbar on the floor.

“Please, Señora. The more witness testimony we have, the easier it will be to secure a conviction.”

He hadn’t mentioned the illegality of taking up a crowbar and chasing down a celebrity—even one with one successful murder and one attempt to his name. Perhaps he assumed she knew. Or perhaps he assumed she didn’t care. Whatever the cause, the result was the same: She heaved a sigh and retreated from the door.

For Héctor, giving a statement proved both easier and more difficult than expected. The questions of what had happened prior to Peralta’s arrival on scene were simple enough. Go over the facts, recall precisely what had happened and turn that into an answer. The next question was delayed, but inevitable.

“Do you have any idea _why_ el Señor de la Cruz would do this?”

He knew. For the first time in over two decades, he knew the answer to that and every question that had dogged him. They all shared the same one, the same answer that made him want to clench a fist and shout and curl in a corner, and Peralta had no idea what he had asked for.

“He poisoned me.” Even as he said it he waited for some new bit of evidence to prove it a lie, or at least challenge the assumption, but Peralta only regarded him with browbones raised. He wouldn’t challenge the claim. He would only wait for elaboration. 

“He poisoned me,” Héctor said again, and the claim felt less foreign, “for the songs I wrote.” 

******

She had to leave.

Héctor had known it from the moment he heard what brought her there. Although recent events had pushed the thought to the back of his mind, the fact had surged to the front once more.

They sat together, across from the back door cracked slightly open while the officers awaited a verdict on what might break the curse, as the assumption that a family blessing might be key no longer seemed to apply. A different assumption, one pointing to him and only him as the sole means of sending Imelda home, had taken root, and he had not yet formed an opinion on it. Nonetheless, they wanted to be certain, and so he and Imelda waited.

When walking the city’s streets, Héctor didn’t always have a good view of the sky. Most times, that was of least importance, or at least of lesser importance to whatever occupied his mind at the moment. But now, with only a few levels of abandoned buildings interrupting, he could see a faint strip of grey edging the horizon. The sun was on its way, but it was not yet in a hurry to arrive. And with Imelda’s hand covering his, he was not in any hurry to greet it.

“Victoria.”

She met his curious gaze with a rueful one.

“Coco’s married, and she has a daughter. Her name is Victoria.”

Coco was married. He’d anticipated this. He’d begun each new crossing attempt, for the past several years, with the reminder that he could find an unfamiliar face at his daughter’s side, and perhaps a different man beside his wife. He hadn’t known if she had chosen that path, hadn’t wanted to assume one way or the other. All he’d known is that if she had found a man fortunate enough to marry her, he would have welcomed him into the family.

Now, he had certainty. Coco was married. She had a daughter. She’d named her Victoria.

There were more questions, about who she’d married and who else that had brought into the family, what they were like and what they did and how that changed the flavor of family gatherings. They crowded to the front of his mind so quickly and so insistently he couldn’t put them into words.

“Victoria,” he managed at last. “It’s a beautiful name.”

*******

There was more, much more, that Imelda revealed, some of it spoken and more written. Coco’s husband was named Julio, and he doted on both wife and daughter. He’d never made a shoe before in his life, but once placed in the family shop, he took to it. His sister’s name was Rosita, and within the few years her brother and Coco had been married, she’d melted into the family as if she’d always belonged.

Héctor drank it in, though it left an aftertaste. Deaths always left holes in a family’s fabric, and for a time, those holes gaped. Anyone who looked could see who was missing and where the deceased had fit in. Over time, the edges might be sewn or embroidered, softening them and preventing further damage. More threads would be added to the length, woven into the cloth as the family moved forward.

Without the whole story, without knowing what caused the tear in her family, she’d done the only thing she could: She’d cut out the hole. She’d removed it and everything around it, stitching the ends together. Anyone who looked could see the seam. Anyone who looked could see something was missing, and had been missing for some time. But the cloth, at least, was whole again.

She’d had few options, he knew, and no way to know what had happened. Removing music, removing _him,_ was likely the only thing she thought she could do in order to move on. But as he read and heard funny and sweet and beautifully mundane stories of the family she’d built in his absence, he wondered if there was still a place for him. He didn’t ask—he would never ask—but still he wondered.

He couldn’t be certain if Imelda had told him everything she’d wanted by the time an officer interrupted. He only knew, from the look on his face, that the answer they’d found was the one they’d suspected. The notion that he, and only he, could be the one to send her home threatened to dizzy him if he held onto it too long; but it was better than the more immediate thought presenting itself.

Sunrise was near. 

******

Imelda hadn’t told him everything. She couldn’t, not in one night. No matter how she abridged things, no matter how she simmered it all down to the bare essentials, there was no way to condense two decades into a few paragraphs. She could share the events documented in pictures and in church records, but all of the ordinary days would be left behind. She could share only ordinary bits, but the ones everyone remembered, the ones everyone asked about, would be ignored.

Nevertheless, he knew who had joined the family. That was the important thing. _You’ll know who is who when you visit next year,_ she’d written, and looked up at him with the least sorrowful smile she could manage. He’d returned it with a look she’d seen before, when she first presented him with the white skull guitar. 

The answer from the station was the answer most everyone now expected: As the original owner of the stolen songbook, Héctor’s blessing would undo the curse. “You can hand her a cempasúchil and say you give her your blessing,” said Peralta, reading the notes he’d been given, “or she can give the songbook back.”

The songbook. Of course. It belonged to him, and she doubted he’d managed to find any stray petals in that trunk. His songs were there, written in his own hand, proof of Ernesto’s theft. Proof that could only help his case.

She took it from her apron and held it a moment. It was his; by all rights, he should have it. There was little use for it in the shop, and Coco would surely question why she had it, once she finished her panic over the cut on her throat and the hoarseness in her voice. One more question, one more worry, and the only one she couldn’t claim no memory of obtaining. Giving it back wasn’t the only choice, but it was the best she could see.

Héctor’s hand covered hers. “If you don’t want it,” he said, “you don’t have to take it.”  

_If you don’t want it._ The words said one thing and his gentle resignation said another. _If you don’t want music in your home, if you don’t want to read these again, if you want to forget…._

The look in his eyes said the rest. _Then that’s all right._

“I can keep it. If you want me to.”

“You—you don’t _have_ to keep it, Imelda.”

She waited, but he didn’t argue one way or the other. His hand did not move from hers until she pulled the book toward her. Despite the officers watching, Imelda held the book to her chest for a moment, just a moment, before slipping it into her apron. Héctor paused, then spoke.

“I—I wrote a song for Coco. It’s in that songbook. She—she’ll know which one it is.”

Imelda could only nod.

A flash of orange caught her eye as Abuelita placed a petal in Héctor’s palm. Their eyes met, and then Abuelita pulled her into her arms.

“Be safe, mija.”

“I will,” she whispered.

Too soon, Abuelita pulled away, and she was left with Héctor, gazing at the cempasúchil as if expecting it to leap out of his hand. He looked up at her, briefly, and then held the petal between his fingers.

“I give you my blessing, Imelda.”

A glow lit the petal like a candle’s flame. Though it didn’t drown out that of Ernesto’s lantern or the ones brought in by the police, the light was steadier, purer. With some effort, she drew her gaze from it and looked into Héctor’s eyes.

She was leaving.

She was going home, back to Coco and Óscar and Felipe and Rosita and Julio and a town that would have questions, so many questions about the cut and her throat and where she’d been and what on earth she of all people was doing with a songbook. But at the moment, none of that seemed as important as the man about to send her there.

He held the petal out, and she wrapped her hand around his. There was so much she could say, so much she’d wanted to say, that all of it died before it reached her lips. Only one truth was left.

“I only ever wanted you to come home.”

His free hand brushed her cheek. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

“Promise….” Her throat closed. The words felt cruel, in light of what she’d learned. He’d tried. He’d tried, and been murdered for the effort. He could return in a year, follow the cempasúchil back to his home and stay near until sunrise demanded they part once more. It would be so much less than what she wanted, than what Coco deserved, and it would have to be enough.  

Héctor cupped her cheek, and for a moment she wanted to forget everything but that touch she remembered so well, everything but the fact she had him again.

“I promise, Imelda. I…” He closed his eyes briefly. “I promise I’ll come home.”

There was nothing more she could say, and yet she fought for something, anything to delay what she had to do. Any question, any statement, no matter how mundane, that might keep her there even a few seconds longer. She had to work up the nerve, she told herself. She needed a moment. She needed time. She needed to think.

She needed to leave now, or she might never go.

She gazed at him another long minute, and then slid her hand upward, grasping the petal.

Cempasúchil swirled around her, ruffling her dress and brushing her skin. She saw Héctor only a second more before the petals filled her vision, and then he was gone.


	16. Part Sixteen

Imelda opened her eyes to the room she had left. Her hands and arms had been restored, flesh and skin shielding bone. She brushed her throat and dried blood cracked beneath her fingertips. The pain still present would make it difficult to offer the explanation her familia would demand, the explanation they deserved—but then, the truth might not be believed.

The bed stood a notable distance from the wall, the trunk at the foot of it lay open, and nearly everything that could be moved out of place had been. Her family had searched here—frantically and several times, from the look of it. The room lacked the sinister disorder of a ransacking, but the chaos of it should have spurred her to clean, to rearrange, to restore, but she hadn’t the strength for it. Not with Héctor’s voice ringing in her ears.

She’d half expected to see him when she opened her eyes, half-hoped she might. Yet she felt no surprise upon finding herself alone. Only an aching numbness that made her clutch her arms and long to sink onto her bed.

But there was silence around that room. She’d let her family worry long enough.

Imelda rested her hand on the doorknob, and when it did not sink through, she pushed it open and walked out. The main area lay shrouded in the early light of dawn, the air carrying an early morning chill. No voices reached her ears. The only footsteps she heard were her own.

If her family were anywhere, they were out searching. Hours had passed, and Santa Cecilia was not a large town. There were a number of places she might have gone, had she wanted to hide, but those would have been searched several times over by now. Everything would have been checked once, twice, and yet again; everyone would have been questioned multiple times, and still her family searched for her.

The front gate seemed the best place to begin, so she went to it. From there, any number of moves might be possible; she might find Rosita questioning neighbors or the twins combing the area outside of town. The thought of wandering the streets for what might be hours, perhaps barely missing contact with someone willing to end her search, made her want to walk back into her bedroom and sleep.

“Mamá?”

Imelda stopped, palm on the handle.

Coco.

She stood in the corridor only a second before racing forward, catching Imelda in her arms and embracing her with such force it nearly drove the wind from her lungs. No sooner had her tears begun to fall than Coco pulled away, hands on her shoulders, gaze landing immediately on Imelda’s bloodied throat.

“¡Dios mio! Mamá, what—?” A hand flew to her mouth as a longer inspection showed her the length of the cut, bruises Imelda could feel but had not yet seen. “Oh Mamá.” It was a whisper, thickened with unshed tears. “What _happened_?”

 _I found your Papá._ The words clawed at her throat. Coco no longer sat by the window awaiting his return, but she still glanced through it, still wore a little extra melancholy on Noche Buena. She kept it to herself, but Imelda could still see it: that hope, however dim, that her Papá would walk through the door and sweep her into a hug. _I found him, mija. He told me how he died._

But there was too much of the unbelievable in the story. Had Imelda not lived it, had she heard it told from a neighbor or a stranger in another town, she might have quirked an eyebrow and asked a few probing questions. Coco wouldn’t be so forward. Coco would keep her questions to herself, but she would still have them.

“I…”

But Coco wasn’t listening. The horror of what she saw must have driven her thoughts into a frenzy, and all she did was stare, hands covering her mouth.  

“Ay Dios,” she whispered. “Ay Dios. We—we need the police.”

******

“Describe what happened, Señora.”

Imelda hesitated, staring at her hands folded on the kitchen table. To do as Officer Godínez asked would be to explain an afterlife different from what she’d been taught to expect. Perhaps she could sift through it and hand over those few details likely to withstand skepticism, but the finding those details seemed as easy as counting all the ants in Oaxaca. He must have taken her hesitation to mean something entirely different, because his tone softened.

“Do you recall the events leading up to the attack?”

She shook her head. It was a lie—one that might not be discovered until after her death, but a lie nonetheless. All the same, Godínez had given her a means of escape, and she had little choice but to take it. 

The officer’s frown deepened, not quite in doubt, but certainly in concern. Imelda closed her eyes, touching fingers to her forehead. When he spoke again, his voice had grown even gentler.

“Did you lose consciousness, Señora?”

In that moment she wished she had. If it would have relieved her of even a few seconds of Ernesto’s eyes staring into hers, if it would have kept the fear and disgust and grim determination she saw from being burned into her memory, she would have welcomed a few moments of lost awareness. “No sé.” 

“Can you tell me what he looked like?”

The easiest answer was, of course, no answer at all. She could claim she remembered nothing, especially not the appearance of her attacker. That would allow him to take on any appearance, allow almost any man in Santa Cecilia or the vicinity to be named a suspect. Any man could be interrogated. Any man could be identified as the guilty party while the true perpetrator fled a different police force in another realm.

“He…” Imelda paused, as though trying to recall details, any detail at all. “He was…tall. At least twenty centimeters taller than I am.”

Godínez jotted that down. “Do you remember anything else?”

Another long pause. If she couldn’t give away his exact appearance, she could hand over enough details to exonerate the men of Santa Cecilia. “He had a square face, a square jaw. And he was thin.”

“How thin?”

“Very thin. Almost skeletal.”

The officer’s frown deepened, but he added that to the description. “Anything else?”

“He wore white.”

Godínez noted that and set his pen down. “Señora, do you have any idea _why_ he might have attacked you?”

The songbook, the guitar, and the man who had died for them both. The knowledge she carried, the things it could do to a murderer’s reputation. To _him._

She knew. She’d known then and she knew now. As much as Imelda longed to pour it out to this officer, as she had poured out her testimony for the police in the Land of the Dead, this was one secret she had to keep.

Imelda bit her lip and shook her head.

*******

Her family’s questions would have been roughly the same as those asked by Officer Godínez—or that was what Imelda surmised, when they remained relatively silent following the police interview. When questions were asked, they were kept to the present: do you need anything to drink, how is your throat, do you want me to stay with you awhile? Simple questions, ones that could be answered with a shake of the head or a tilt of the hand. There were times when Imelda had stood in a doorway and looked out at her familia, wondering how so many wonderful people could gather in one place, but she couldn’t recall a time she’d felt it as intensely as she did now.

She tried to doze, but when she closed her eyes she saw Ernesto’s gazing into hers, felt his cold fingers at her throat. So she lay awake, weariness pressing down on her as sunlight shone through the curtains and reminded her of just how long she’d gone without sleep. Pepita lay curled against her side, her constant purring a greater comfort than the cat would ever know.

Coco cracked the door open some time later. She was checking to see if she’d gotten to sleep, Imelda knew, but as she didn’t foresee that transpiring in the near future, there was little point pretending. “Hola, Coco.”

She opened the door and stepped through. “You shouldn’t be talking, Mamá.”

“Should have told that to the police.” Her throat had not recovered entirely, but it was on its way, according to a quick comparison of pain now versus pain before. 

Coco smiled faintly, though there was little mirth in it, and sat by the bed. For a few minutes, she remained in silence; a glance at her face showed her eyes downcast but not saddened, lower lip partially hidden by the other—the expression she wore when her mind was heavy with unasked questions.

She looked so like Héctor. She looked like herself, of course, but now more than ever Imelda could see his features echoed in her daughter, her expressions mirroring his more closely than she might ever realize.

“I found your Papá’s songbook.”

The change in her daughter was instantaneous; for a split second, Imelda thought Coco might leap from her chair. “ _What?_ You—Mamá, when?”

Imelda thought it might help if she smiled, but she couldn’t manage one. “Around the time Ernesto de la Cruz was buried here.”

Her face flickered in thought; though the connection between discovery and attack apparently eluded her, the length of time between discovery and revelation did not. “You’ve had it all this time?”

Imelda closed her eyes. She hadn’t known what to do beside shove it out of sight, keep the memories at bay. Keep the pain as far from her as possible. But that did nothing for Coco. Coco, who would have liked to have it close by. Coco, who would have spent hours poring over the pages, humming the once-familiar tunes to herself as best she could remember them. Coco, who had a song written for her in that book.

“Lo siento, mija.”

Silence settled over the room.

“You didn’t have to tell me.”

 _But I wish you would have._ The words were as clear as though she’d spoken them aloud. Imelda heard them, and they cut to her core.

She tried to think of a reason, any reason, that she could give her daughter. She’d been in shock. She hadn’t been certain it was Héctor’s. She hadn’t wanted to upset her, had only wanted to keep the peace. But the more reasons she thought of, and the longer she pondered them, the more they began to sound like excuses.

There was one thing she could do, one thing only, and it wouldn’t be enough.  Imelda reached under her pillow and retrieved the songbook.

Coco’s eyes lit up even before she held it. She pressed her lips together as she ran a hand over the cover she hadn’t seen since childhood, laid a hand over the leather. She remembered. Twenty-one years and she still remembered.

“He always had this,” Coco whispered after a moment. “I—I never thought he’d simply _lose_ it.”

“I don’t think he did.”

Coco looked up. 

“He wouldn’t have parted with it easily, Coco. I honestly expected him to come looking by now.” 

It was the truth, but divorced from the context in which she’d learned it, divorced of the certainty she carried, it felt like a lie. Like betrayal. If it showed on her face, Coco didn’t notice.

“I….” She bit her lip, running a thumb over the cover. “Do you mind if I keep this awhile?”

Perhaps it was the hope, the longing in her daughter’s voice; perhaps it was the way she cradled the songbook. Whatever the case, a lump settled in Imelda’s throat.

“Of course not, Coco.”

*******

Imelda wrote to him, pen scratching across paper by the light of a candle. She told him about the police, about the questions, about the deep frowns and what they likely meant. The description she’d given was unsettling, to say the least; she wouldn’t be surprised if whispers of the supernatural made their way into retellings of the details. Whispers she could never confirm or deny, even to her own daughter.

Her eyes stung. Coco didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She hadn’t seen Héctor as he now was, as he would remain, and she wouldn’t until death claimed her as well. She could read his songs, but she wouldn’t hear them as they were meant to be sung for years. 

_You didn’t have to leave._

The words landed on the page before she could stop them. 

_You could have stayed. You could have stayed here in Santa Cecilia. You could have played for weddings and quinces and anything else people need music for. You could have come home at the end of each day to a family that loved you, a family that needed you._

_You told me why you left. Oh, you told me a dozen times and I still don’t understand why. How can I when the very man who led you out the door left you dead in the street?_

Words flowed so quickly she occasionally missed a letter. Tears fell and smudged the ink, but she did not stop. She couldn’t stop. Her words danced in circles, hammered the same points, and yet she continued to write.

When all was done and the words ceased to flow, Imelda gazed at her letter without reading it. Two pages of words held in for two decades, words released by a single revelation. Two pages of tearful accusations thrown at the feet of a murdered man.

She swallowed her tears and held the letter to the flame.

*******

With only the vaguest of claims and no evidence to back it, Coco still hadn’t accepted the truth. Imelda couldn’t fault her for that. She’d spent her life looking out the window; she wouldn’t stop simply because the story had changed. 

It had occurred to Imelda that she might be able to place Héctor’s photo on the ofrenda while her daughter believed he still lived. _“Just in case, mija. If he wants to visit, he’ll be able to visit.”_ After twenty-one years of aggressively embracing the opposite belief, such a reversal would appear to Coco as absolute lunacy.

She needed proof. If she were to claim the story of their family had changed so dramatically, she would need to present some sort of evidence for the shift.

In the year after his departure, Imelda had nurtured visions of burning Héctor’s many letters, tossing them in a fire and watching the lies he’d written curl to ash. She’d be free of him then, she’d told herself, free to forget those sweet words she’d been fool enough to believe.

Yet whenever she had a moment to spare, she’d found herself staring at the box, unwilling to reread the letters and unable to complete the task she’d set out to do. Sometimes she had kicked the box back into its corner. Sometimes she had simply walked away. But after each attempt to rid herself of the letters ended the same way, she’d allowed the stalemate to stretch on indefinitely. The letters remained in their box, and she remained well away from them.

Now, she approached them again, feeling for all the world as though she were attempting to rekindle a friendship she had taken pains to destroy. It was only a box, she assured herself. Nothing more than that. Imelda pulled it onto her lap and began sifting through.

She tried to read nothing more than the dates. October 20. September 18. November 1. Some letters shared the same date; she remembered now how some envelopes would be stuffed with multiple pages, some bearing the same date and some not. Ignoring the niggling voice at the back of her mind, reminding her of all she needed to do, she’d sit and read them until there was nothing left to read.

Despite her attempts to resist, she caught fragments.

— _only just arrived, Diosa, and I already long to share it with you—_

_—weather is fine, not too hot but not quite at that in-between stage where all is perfect, only hot enough to remind you of the heat—_

_—met a man who told us the strangest story, I don’t know if you’ll believe it, but he swore it’s true and I believed him, he was very convincing—_

He’d told her everything, in the beginning, had spilled every detail no matter how trivial or banal, and he’d shared it as though a noontime meal was the most exciting thing to happen that day. And in the beginning, she’d smiled despite her anger, despite the simmering fear. 

She didn’t know how long she’d sat there, going through each yellowed sheet, before the one she’d sought leaped out at her.

 _December 6, 1921._ The date stared her in the face, and she stared blankly back. He’d continued writing until the end.

It was all she needed. She had the date. She had the location. This was reason enough to go to Mexico City in search of whatever information the police had kept, a good enough excuse to keep Coco from wondering just what had come over her mamá. She didn’t need to read it.

_Dearest Imelda,_

_Ernesto and I have arrived in Mexico City._

Mexico City. He’d said it himself, laid out proof of his final destination. She could take the letter back to the house, get on with her plans.

_It’s a city much like the rest. There are buildings laid out as far as the eye can see, people walking the streets, more conversations than anyone could ever hear. I have seen it before, but even if I hadn’t, it would look the same as every other city in México. Once you visit enough cities, as many cities as I have, the views all blend together._

_I miss you, Imelda. I miss Coco. I miss Santa Cecilia. It’s a longing so deep I can’t put it to words. I can only dream of the day I return, the day you and Coco are in my arms again._

And that was all. Imelda had read that letter again and again in the month following, the month before she shoved it out of sight. The more she read it, the more clues she’d found to support her belief: He’d grown tired of her. Writing to her had become a chore. Perhaps he was bored with Mexico City, but there were other cities he’d seen, others that had caught his eye. The final lines— _I can only dream of the day I return—_ had sounded more rote with each rereading.

Now she could picture him as he must have been, forehead cradled in one hand as he fought for words to express his thoughts. What she’d thought to be boredom now sounded more than ever like despair, the sort that held him in bed a little longer than necessary, that made everything take more effort than usual. He’d used simple words, short thoughts, because more complex wordplay had eluded him. More details would have broken him. 

_I miss you, Imelda. I miss Coco. I miss Santa Cecilia._

Imelda hadn’t seen it. She’d had only his words, and words were only as reliable as the medium bearing them. 

But Ernesto had seen it. Ernesto had been at his side through it all. He’d seen Héctor sink into that pit, watched grief gnaw at his endurance, heard it seep into his words and into his music.

He’d known the cure and slipped his amigo poison instead.

Tears clouded Imelda’s vision. Ernesto would spend years or decades as a fugitive, or he would spend that time in prison. His soul, his mind, everything he _was_ would suffer while those in the living world praised him as a hero. He wouldn’t enjoy it, would see little to nothing of it, and yet the worship would continue as long as no one rose to challenge it. His memory would thrive in one realm while he suffered in another.

It wasn’t enough.

Imelda lifted the box, Héctor’s final letter resting at the top of the pile. There might no longer be enough evidence to convince the world Ernesto de la Cruz was a murderer. Perhaps there never was. But a fraud? She could prove that much. 

*******

She didn’t know if Officer Godínez would return with more questions, but when he did she was not surprised. What did surprise her was the bags beneath his eyes, the simmering fear and worry in them, the desperation in his voice when he spoke. She felt a pang of guilt. The details she’d given him might have kept innocent men from suspicion, but they also kept him awake. 

“Señora, I know you said you didn’t remember much. But please, if there is _anything else,_ anything that might give us _some_ sort of lead….”

Imelda hesitated as though in thought, but her mind had been made up long before. “The only unusual thing I did before the attack was finding Héctor’s songbook.”

“Héctor.” He frowned. She must have avoided speaking his name too well. 

“We were married.”

“Oh!” He’d perked up some. It almost certainly wasn’t a proper lead, not quite, but it was more than he’d had. “Ay—when did this happen?”

She gave him the date as best she could recall. 

His face fell, but curiosity edged in. “Did you have it with you at the time of the attack?”

“No.” It was Ernesto who deserved the blame. If a lie might shield his colleagues and underlings from suspicion, then a lie was what she would give. 

Godínez frowned. “You wouldn’t still have it, would you?”

Imelda slipped it from her apron and handed it over, watching his frown deepen as he thumbed through the pages.

“These…these are all Ernesto de la Cruz songs.”

“It’s Héctor’s handwriting.”

He flicked through a few more pages, pausing on one. Even upside down, Imelda could make out the title and first line to “Recuérdame.”

“Señora,” he said after a long moment’s study, “how old is this book?”

There. That was the question she’d hoped for. It wasn’t a pronouncement of guilt, but it could work its way to one. “He had it before we married in 1917, and took it when he left in 1921.”

He studied the song again. Imelda hadn’t brought herself to listen to anything Ernesto had bothered to record, but from the deep frown creasing the officer’s face, it appeared “Un Poco Loco” was not the only song he had changed. The months between the songbook’s disappearance and her attack made the connection tenuous, she knew. But the connection between an old songbook and an undeservedly popular músico—that connection was stronger. 

And she knew, when he finally ended his perusal and looked up from the songbook, that he thought it was worth an investigation. 


	17. Part Seventeen

_1917_

Héctor had promised to meet her there, and he had never broken a promise before. Yet as Imelda paced, she admitted that this might be the first time, but not the last, that he did.

It must have been her tone, the fear she’d let slip through. Or perhaps she’d sounded too angry when she said she wanted to meet—just enough to let him know this would not be like their usual meetings. He was hesitating, she thought; hesitating so long she would wait for hours, long past the time her parents would expect her home.

Or perhaps he already knew why she’d called him there.

Imelda let out a breath, her next step striking the earth with more force than necessary. He’d guessed. Whether it was her tone or the days she’d spent avoiding him, he’d guessed the reason, and the reason kept him away. _Would_ keep him away. By the time her parents realized what she had, he would be long gone.

If they didn’t know already.

She had to find him. Had to return to town and seek him out, no matter how angry he might become or how many people might witness the confrontation. She’d find him, she’d tell him what he’d done, and tell him _exactly_ what he needed to do to fix it. _No_ would not be an option. _Maybe_ would not be an option. The moment she hunted him down, she would—

Something crashed through the brush, and she jumped.

For a moment, she couldn’t comprehend what she saw. It was Héctor, of course, but he carried his guitar. She’d called him to a serious talk, a talk that might end whatever existed between them, and he’d brought an _instrument?_

“Lo siento,” he said, breathing faster than usual. “I know I’m late—you sounded upset, so I went for my guitar, but it was a little out of tune, so I had to tune it, but it was more out of tune than I thought, so I had to tune it _more,_ and then I looked, and I was supposed to be here and I _wasn’t,_ so…” He balanced his guitar in his hands, adjusting the strap over his shoulder. “I’m here now.”

Imelda understood everything he’d said, and yet at that moment she couldn’t quite comprehend it all. He wore that smile of his, the one that had drawn her in, that still drew her in. Here she was about to make it disappear, and he’d brought a _guitar_ to cheer her.

She’d prepared a speech, a series of smaller points leading up to the revelation, but it had all slipped her mind. There was only the thing she’d called him there to say, stripped of anything that might soften it.

“Estoy embarazada.”

As predicted, his smile fell, plunging him into silence. Imelda drew a breath, recovering the points she’d drafted. _This baby isn’t only mine; it’s yours, too. Our child will need a mother_ and _a father, and—_

Héctor set his guitar on the ground, coming forward to grip her shoulders. “I—Imelda, is it true?”

She nodded.

“You…you’re going to be a mamá? I’m going to be a papá?”

She blinked.

“You—we—we’re going to be a _family_?”

“I—sí, but—“

He drew one breath, then another, his hands loosening their grip. He backed a step or two, putting a hand to his forehead in disbelief. She’d expected this.

She hadn’t expected his smile.

“You—I—ah!” He sprang back and took her shoulders again, grin as wide as the sky. “Imelda, this is wonderful!”

Her mouth opened and closed, her voice refusing to articulate the words her mind had stopped producing.

“Is it a boy or a girl? No no no, it’s too early—it’ll be a surprise, a wonderful surprise—what about names? Do you like names? I mean, what names do you like? We need a name.”

“I—ah—“

“Maybe Socorro? Ay! Miguel is a good name! How about Miguel? Oh—ay Dios, what if he doesn’t like that name?”

Imelda wasn’t certain she’d caught up with him yet, but she managed to recover her voice. “Héctor, we—“

She didn’t think it possible for his grin to brighten any more, but he looked to her and that was what it did. “Ay! You probably know more names than I do, or maybe you like more of them—or maybe not, that’s fine, I’ll like whatever you—“

“ _Héctor!_ ”

He halted, blinking in confusion. “What?”

“We’re not _married.”_

Scarcely a moment passed before he brightened again. “Well, we can change that!”

Now it was her turn to blink at him.

“I mean, if you want to.”

“Are…” Her voice seemed to have fled, and it took her a moment to find it. “Did…did you just….?”

His expectant smile lingered briefly, then vanished as he released her to grasp handfuls of his hair. “What—no! This isn’t—I had it _planned,_ I wrote a _song_ , I— _argh_!”

The toe of one boot scuffed the ground in a half-hearted kick, but Imelda’s mind was still racing, desperately trying to catch up to where he was.

He wanted to marry her.

He’d planned to ask. Planned it even before the news she’d shared, and that news had not ended that plan. He wanted to marry and settle down and be a family, and he wanted to do it with her.

“Sí.”

Héctor stopped. “What….what did you say?”

“I said yes, Héctor.” The word warmed her as she spoke it and she smiled. She couldn’t help it. “Sí. I want to marry—“

Before she could finish, he’d caught her up in his arms, holding her so tightly and with such enthusiasm he lifted her off the ground and spun her.

“Ay, te amo, Imelda, gracias, te amo.” She thought he’d continue along that vein, gushing one pronouncement after another, but he set her down and crushed her close again. “I’ll do it right this time. I promise—I’ll ask you the right way, and I’ll sing, and—“

She had heard enough. She stood on tiptoe, tugged him down and sealed his promise with a kiss.

********

_1943_

Imelda stood in the graveyard, her back firmly to Ernesto’s mausoleum. From the brief glance she’d given, he’d received fewer offerings this year, the marble walls lacking the many cempasúchil garlands that had festooned it the year prior. Satisfying though the sight was, she couldn’t bring herself to look. Not without the urge to tear it down with her bare hands seizing her again.

Héctor had not been buried with the rest of the family, not yet. A few inquiries and a good bit of paperwork filed in Mexico City had allowed her to identify the nameless man by the picture he’d carried in his pocket, both for her family and for a public waiting to learn just how deep their hero’s deception went. But while proving his death had been simple enough, bringing his body home for a proper burial was not. Seeking remains buried two decades prior in a pauper’s grave was no mean feat.

From the plot she’d chosen for him, she could see over the rest of the graves and toward the wide expanse that, one year before, had appeared to her as a chasm strung with bridges of glowing petals. She saw nothing now—would see nothing, even if she returned after sunset, after nightfall. Unless some belonging on a neighbor’s grave caught her eye, the bridges and those who crossed them would remain unseen.

Perhaps she’d see Almarza first; perhaps she’d catch Héctor on his way across. Perhaps his joy at seeing her again would drive the cause from his mind. Or perhaps he’d groan: _“I married a graverobber.”_

Imelda smiled. She could imagine him saying it, picture it in his voice, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to hear it from him as he stood beside her or before her, hand to his forehead. She wanted to tease him about his first offer of marriage, watch him shake his head at the memory. She’d accepted it then, and she’d done it before he’d mentioned the song he’d written, before he’d coaxed her out onto her balcony with its notes.

She’d have accepted if there was no song, if that simple smiled optimism was all he’d given her, and she wanted to tell him that. 

She wrapped her arms around her middle as a breeze stirred cempasúchil at her feet. The dead would cross at sunset, and sunset was still hours off. If she stayed until then, or returned just after, she could take a look. Just a quick look, just long enough to be certain that the bridge was beyond her sight.

Twenty-two years had passed since Héctor walked out that door, out of town and out of her life. In that time she had built a family and a business, lost friends and gained respect. He wouldn’t return; each year had only sharpened her certainty of that fact.

But then, there was a world of difference between _wouldn’t_ and _couldn’t._ She’d known this too, but now that the former had been replaced with the latter, there were times she felt she had been tossed into a cenote and left to tread water.

Imelda watched the horizon, felt the breeze brush her skin and ruffle her skirts. The bridge did not appear.

It wouldn’t, she knew. Not yet, and not for her. The curse had been lifted, and barring an accident or some other untimely demise, she wouldn’t see the bridge for years.

With one last glance, Imelda turned and retraced her steps. Tonight, Héctor would come home, and she would be there to welcome him. 

********

The first stranger had appeared in the zapatería earlier that year, newspaper clipping in hand. _Ernesto de la Cruz Not Author of Songs,_ the headline read; Imelda had seen it elsewhere.

“Is—is this where Héctor Rivera lived?”

“Sí.”

Imelda’s foot twitched against her ankle. Once her boot was off, she leaned down, slowly, to lift it and set it on a recessed shelf behind the counter, within easy reach. The man didn’t appear angry—but then, fury had been wholly absent from Ernesto’s expression for as long as he’d kept his hands around her throat.

He nodded at that, in the distracted way that said he’d sought confirmation. A quick glance at the article, and then he returned his attention to Imelda. “I heard the guitar was his. Your husband’s, I mean.”

She shot a look toward Julio, who was attending a customer. His quick glance confirmed: If things went sour, he’d be at her side in an instant. “I gave it to him as a wedding gift.”

“May…” He trailed off, drew a breath, and began again. “If you have a photo of it…?”

Another glance at Julio sent him toward the workshop, which brought Óscar and Felipe through the door. She relaxed. They might be needed in the workshop, but she’d rather have three at her defense if this interaction took a turn for the worse.

The only problem was that, from the expectant looks they wore, she now had to make a decision.

Imelda looked to the stranger again. Still no anger, still no smirk. Only curiosity. No—this wasn’t curiosity; it was too mournful for that. This man looked for all the world like he’d been called to identify his amigo’s body.

The twinge of sympathy came before she could quash it.

“Julio,” she said, and her son-in-law drew himself up as if snapping to attention. “Go fetch the family photo from inside.”

With a questioning glance toward the twins that didn’t slow his pace, Julio did as he was told. Imelda presented it to the stranger, holding it some centimeters away when visions of the frame smashed and the recently repaired photo torn to pieces entered her mind. He didn’t protest. He simply gazed at the photo, nodding in realization.

“That…that’s it. That’s the guitar.”

Imelda nodded. She’d turned her attention to the photo, but it didn’t rest on Coco. She’d sat quietly as it was taken, as patiently as a child of her age could have, but it was Héctor who had threatened the final product. Even for a serious family photo, he couldn’t keep a smile from his lips.

“He and el Señor de la Cruz. They knew each other?”

“They were amigos long before I met Héctor.” She knew she ought to meet the stranger’s gaze, but she couldn’t bring herself to look away from the image of her husband, from that calm smile he’d been unable or unwilling to hide. “They had all the stories and jokes you’d expect—sometimes, all they’d need to do was look at each other and they’d burst out laughing.”

“Ay Dios. De la Cruz, after your husband died—he never told you?”

“No.”

“Ay Dios,” the stranger breathed again. Imelda managed to meet his gaze a moment before he cast it to the floor, head in one hand, and the twinge of sympathy stabbed her again. The evidence found suggested Héctor’s death had been an accident, though details had been withheld from the press. According to the prevailing theory, Ernesto had simply absconded with songbook and guitar without pausing to inform the man’s widow of his death, leaving his friend's body for strangers to find. Imelda had always found the notion too gentle, extending too much doubt toward the man who had taken Héctor’s life and possessions with little apparent remorse.

She’d known the full truth and seen the assumption through her own eyes, but in that moment, she saw it through the eyes of this stranger—and what she saw was monstrous.

He gazed at the floor for long moments; then, as if woken from a trance, shook his head slightly. “Perdóname,” he said. “And—gracias.”

Only after he left the shop did Imelda feel she ought to have said something.

*******

Coco was not within sight when she arrived home, and she wasn’t in the kitchen, either. One small, sad smile from Rosita, and Imelda knew where her daughter had gone.

She found her in the room she shared with Julio, kneeling on the floor with letters scattered beside. Imelda didn’t need to see the handwriting to know who had written them or why they had been brought out. She simply knelt beside her daughter.

“I put his songbook on the ofrenda,” Coco said, lowering the letter she’d been reading. “I know you said he might want to have it.”

Imelda closed her eyes. She could almost feel his hand over hers, hear the trepidation as he spoke. _“You don’t have to keep it, Imelda.”_

“The guitar is there too,” Coco went on. A small smile touched her lips. “Victoria wanted so badly to play it, but I think it’d be best if she learned first?”

Imelda nodded absently. Ernesto’s estate had handed over the guitar and songbook with surprisingly little resistance, though she suspected the move had been less an act of benevolence or contrition and more an attempt to quell rumors they’d had something to do with the narrow scar across her neck. If the words still hissed between townsfolk and strangers alike— _“She found something they’d wanted to hide, and she nearly paid the price”—_ was any indication, their decision had yielded only partial success.

“¿Estás bien, Mamá?”

The question had come often within the past year. After the attack. After the investigation into the songbook returned news of Héctor’s death. After that first encounter with a disillusioned fan of Ernesto’s. Sometimes Coco had asked first; sometimes Imelda had, but each time it produced the same answer: a nod, a few words of comfort. They’d held each other, to be sure; they’d spoken of Héctor and what had happened and they’d shared tears. There were still things Coco kept to herself, Imelda knew, just as she had done.  

But those things Coco kept hidden—those were private matters. Hurt that did less damage when concealed than when brought into the open. Questions with expected answers. She had every right to bring those things to the surface, to shout and weep and accuse if it came to that, but she hadn’t, and Imelda wouldn’t cajole her into it.  

The things Imelda kept hidden, the story she had stashed away within her own mind, was different.

_“I sing to you. You and Coco, every year.”_

On the other side of the bridge, her Papá waited, and sang, and thought of her. His daughter had kept his letters hidden, saved the scrap of portrait that Imelda had never quite worked up the nerve to throw away. Coco had held fast to those few memories she’d formed, with nothing to sustain her but the belief she would see him again. 

Hearing the story wouldn’t be the same as seeing it with her own eyes. It wouldn’t be the same as seeing Héctor, as hearing that he’d intended to return in his own voice. It wouldn’t be certainty.

But it would be far more than she had. 

“Coco, I….” She sighed, her gaze dropping briefly to the letters—the songs he’d written for his daughter. “I never told you what happened last year, while I was gone all that time.”

“I thought you didn’t remember.”

“No, I remember.” Imelda returned Coco’s intense curiosity with a small, sad smile. “I remember everything.”

*******

Héctor felt exposed.

It wasn’t the extra border agents who seemed to have all found excuses to be near the desk when his turn came. Nor was it the police officers who had drifted over as much as their posts would allow. Neither occurrence was uncommon, in his experience; people found a way to be close when the time came to enact his latest bridge-crossing scheme.

But there was no scheme this time. No disguise, no ruse, no distraction thrown toward anyone who might keep him from the bridge. There was only him. 

The border agent handling photos on his side of the desk was a woman named Claudia. He’d seen her before, and she offered a smile. “Héctor Rivera. Let’s see what we have.”

She might not have learned his name over the past twenty years of failed crossings. It had dominated newspapers and conversations in the months following Imelda’s visit. He’d fielded questions, given answers, and, in the weeks and months preceding Ernesto’s arrest and Raúl Badilla’s capture, he had never been far from the watchful, protective gaze of one officer or another. His name had become as well known throughout the Land of the Dead as the man who had sent him there.

But without a photo, no amount of recognition would get him across the bridge.

He scarcely had time to panic over the _what-ifs_ — _what if the photo was destroyed after all, what if she couldn’t find it_ —before Claudia looked up with a smile.

“Here you are, Señor Rivera,” she said, turning it so he could see, “on your family’s ofrenda.”

And there he was, one hand on the guitar and the other on Imelda’s shoulder. On the agent’s desk. On his family’s ofrenda.

He tried to stammer something, some word that slipped his mind. Mamá Antonia took his arm a second before he remembered the word was _gracias._

“Ven, Héctor,” she said. He hadn’t removed his gaze from the photo, but he heard the smile in her tone. “She’s waiting.”

********

Santa Cecilia had changed.

It was expected, after a twenty-two year absence. New buildings went up. Old ones were added to. Imelda’s family— _his_ family—explained the changes as they passed, but he heard little of it through the single fact running through his head.

He was _here._ Back in Santa Cecilia, walking streets he hadn’t seen since the day he walked out the door. Despite beginning each crossing attempt with a reminder that yes, he _would_ make it this time, he _would_ get across that bridge and he _would_ make it home, Héctor knew then that in the back of his mind, there had always been doubt.

If any of it remained by the time they reached his old home, it vanished when he stepped through the gates.

It was larger than he remembered; but then, the family had grown. The mischievous children he remembered were now Tío Óscar and Tío Felipe. Coco was a mother. There would be more space, more rooms in their home, than the simple house he’d left.

There was movement everywhere, family both living and dead streaming from one room to the other, laughing, talking. A short man with a mustache danced with a small girl to a song playing from a phonograph Héctor couldn’t see. Julio and Victoria—his granddaughter and son-in-law. So many people moved about, so much joy was palpable, that for a moment he couldn’t think what to do or where to go. He could only watch. 

Imelda stepped through a doorway. Before his mind consciously formed the thought, he followed after, stopping just inside.

Even without the family portrait to guide him, it would have been easy to see which offerings were his. He’d expected a letter or two, perhaps some chapulines, and chapulines were certainly present. They sat atop a new suit, folded neatly beside a pair of shoes. More food, more gifts were there as well, but his eye was drawn to the basket of letters all bearing his name and the sender—some from Imelda, some from Coco. His songbook and guitar proudly adorned the ofrenda of a family that had once banned music.

Imelda set the candle back on the ofrenda, paused as though she’d heard a noise, and turned.

_She won’t see you._ Héctor had known this even before his death. The dead could not be seen, they could not be heard, not by any still among the living. Speaking with Imelda, looking into her eyes and holding her in his arms—it all had been an exception, and a rare one at that. In the Land of the Living, he would be a presence, nothing more.

Yet for the briefest of moments, her eyes seemed to meet his, and he could have sworn she saw him standing in the doorway. Then her gaze drifted past him, through him, and all he could do was step forward as she turned back to the ofrenda, half-facing him as she watched his photo. 

“You promised you’d come home.”  

There was no trace of accusation in those words. No anger, no despair. Simply a statement of fact. Héctor did not answer it, and not only because she wouldn’t hear.

“I missed you, Héctor. I waited for you, I prayed for you, I…” She bowed her head in silence. A few tears slipped free.  

_I’m here, Imelda._ He wanted to say those words. Useless though they would be, he wanted to say them in the vain hope she would hear them, even as a whisper. More from instinct than anything, he laid a hand over hers.

She looked up. Not at the photo, not at the rest of the ofrenda, but at the place where he stood.

She couldn’t see him. He knew that. Her gaze was nothing more than a lucky guess, or an educated one. Yet even so, the smile she gave him set his chest fluttering and aching all at once. She closed her eyes, tears glistening on her cheeks, shining beside her smile.

He wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to hold her close and spin her around the room, not to the music or any semblance of rhythm but simply from sheer _joy._ He wanted to laugh, to cry, to do both at once, but he stayed where he was, hand over hers, giving her a smile she couldn’t see.

She knew he’d come home. 

And that was enough. 


	18. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not necessary to read my other fic, Mija, to understand this epilogue, but just know that the same basic principle—of loved ones crossing from the Land of the Dead, and appearing as they did in life—will be relevant here.

_1970_

Imelda didn’t dare return to sleep.

Habit played a role, to be sure. For as long as she’d made shoes, she had risen before the sun. Shoes took time, and in those early days before she mastered the art of efficiency, she could only gain more time by sacrificing a few hours’ rest. Even after the zapatería gained the success it needed, she had continued to rise in darkness, to the point where Coco’s increasingly frequent admonitions that she sleep a little longer, that she rest, that she and the others could handle it all, would have been useless even if she were inclined to heed them.

She rubbed the back of her neck, wincing as it failed to ease the pain there. She’d eaten nothing, fearing more than water would further upset her stomach, and walking more than a few paces was more tiring than it should have been, but returning to bed meant returning to the dream.

It was a simple one, and nothing she hadn’t seen before. In it, she wandered long, empty halls past the Department of Family Reunions, past Entry Records and a hundred other doors bearing signs she hadn’t paused to read. No matter how many times she called Héctor’s name, no matter how loudly she called it, only echoes answered, and only waking ended the search.

Imelda fed leather through the sewing machine. Weariness forced her to go slower than usual; much as it irked her, she wouldn’t allow impatience to ruin a good piece of material. The police, the border agents—they had found Héctor before. They had found Abuelita. There had to be some sort of system in place connecting the recently departed with loved ones; otherwise, they had little right to call themselves the Department of Family Reunions.

He’d come home for every Día de Muertos since she’d found him, and he would return for this one as well. Whenever death claimed her, finding her husband would be simple enough—time-consuming, perhaps, but simple. She knew all this, knew it when she woke and when she closed her eyes at night, and yet when that dream came again, only immersion in work could drive it away.

She shut off the machine as the lightheadedness plaguing her became a wash of dizziness.

Coco would wake before long. She had always been an early riser, but she seemed to have set her alarm earlier as of late. Imelda often joked Coco did so simply to tell her to go back to bed and rest, but her daughter had never denied it.

If Coco told her to go back to bed, perhaps it wouldn’t be a waste of time to listen. Sleep wasn’t necessary. Imelda could read or listen to music or simply lie beneath her quilt with her thoughts. Once Coco was awake, once Imelda knew the workshop was off to a good start, she could go and lie down.

The dizziness didn’t pass completely, but it abated enough for her to focus on the task. She reached to turn the sewing machine on again and pain gripped her chest.

Coco.

She had to tell Coco. Or Julio. Or Rosita. Anyone.

Imelda stepped back from the workbench, falling to her knees the moment her support was gone. She tried to draw a breath, to shout for help, but managed only a small gasp as the pain drowned out speech.

Seconds before she fell, and moments before she plunged into blackness, she thought she saw a figure by the door.

******

She woke to callused fingers brushing her cheek.

For a moment, she couldn’t think who it might be or why they were awake at such an early hour, when she hadn’t made a sound. She could only keep her eyes closed as the touch soothed the lingering ache in her chest. Victoria, she thought at last. How she’d known to come to the workshop and why she was stroking her abuelita’s cheek rather than shaking her were questions Imelda couldn’t answer.

She opened her eyes, and Héctor smiled back.

He wasn’t the skeleton that curse had led her to. This Héctor could have stepped directly from a memory, with his crooked nose and his dark hair falling too close to his eyes and that mole she’d nearly forgotten beside a smile she remembered all too well.

An illusion.

Imelda closed her eyes again. She’d seen Héctor in death. This was a dream, a figment conjured by a mind desperate for comfort. She wanted to welcome the sight, but with her husband far beyond her reach, it was little more than a taunt.

“¿Estás bien, Imelda?” The fingers withdrew from her cheek; she heard the sound of Héctor’s palm slapping his forehead. “Ay, what kind of question is _that_? You just died—though I guess you might be better _now_? If it didn’t hurt too much?”

She opened her eyes. All of the familiar features she’d dusted off and restored as best she could were there, but they were sharper. Crisper. Seeing a vision from the past was one thing; feeling it brush your cheek was quite another.

Héctor looked for a moment as though he were about to say something else, to apologize maybe, but he glanced up, at the workshop and the idle sewing machine and the unfinished boot just beyond his vision. “Imelda,” he said a bit slowly, “if you were dying, why weren’t you in bed?”

Imelda smiled, and her smile became a laugh.

Before he could question her laughter or anything else, she sat up and threw her arms around him. The feel of him in her arms—she thought she’d forgotten, but it was as though she’d only embraced him yesterday.

“It _is_ you.”

He laughed. “Of course it’s me. Who did you think I was?”

She didn’t want to explain any more than she wanted to let go. Héctor was there, the real Héctor, not an illusion and not a dream. She didn’t know why he’d appeared as he had in life and she didn’t want to ask. Not then. Not when he had come for her.

Her arms loosened around him just before he felt her tense and pulled back. The fever, the pain, Héctor in the workshop—in her joy over the latter, she’d failed to connect it to the former and now it was too late to explain it all to Coco or Julio or Elena—ay Dios, what if it was Elena or Victoria who found her first, grown though they were? But the more she considered it, the worse the prospect seemed for anyone, walking into the workshop and finding her dead on the floor with an unfinished boot on the workbench.

“Imelda.”

She didn’t know if it was Héctor’s voice or his hand on her cheek that commanded her attention, but she glanced at him and saw a gentle smile, eyes full of understanding and sorrow and joy all mingled into one.

“It’ll be okay.”

Imelda closed her eyes as he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. It wouldn’t be okay, not immediately. Not for a while, perhaps a long while. There would be mourning, and disbelief, and long nights spent awake in the worst sort of wonder. Someone would have to finish that boot she’d left and all the other orders she’d taken upon herself to complete.

But time would soften their grief. It wouldn’t ever leave them, not entirely, but its sharp edges would be worn down until they could carry it without being continually pricked by thoughts of the past. And she wouldn’t be gone from them. She would come to visit and watch her family grow, see great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren and people who married in, accompanied by others she hadn’t seen in decades.  

She would see it all with Héctor at her side.

Imelda allowed herself a smile, just a small one. “I suppose I can’t finish that boot before we go?”

Héctor laughed and embraced her again, and her anxiety ebbed. He was with her, he’d come for her, and no matter how far he led her, she wouldn’t be alone. She watched him get to his feet and allowed him to help her stand. 

“The bridge shouldn’t be far,” Héctor said. “I think that’s where we need to go.”

It wasn’t a great distance, but it was far enough to hold his hand. Far enough to coax him into conversation. Thirty years of letters sent on a single holiday hadn’t been enough.

She didn’t realize she’d been staring until he brushed her cheek. “What are you thinking about, mi amor?”

In answer, she pulled him down and kissed him long and deep.

“Dios mio,” he breathed when it ended, lips curving into a smile.

She wanted to gaze at him forever, to simply watch him and store away as many details as she could. The sound of his voice, the way his hair fell, the softness in his eyes when he looked at her. The smile he now wore, different from the one he’d greeted her with. She had to remember these things, to hold them close and treasure them. 

He took her hand, and those thoughts quieted. 

She was leaving, not alone but with Héctor. Countless days and nights to see him, to hear him, to sit with him and talk over everything that had filled the time between them began now, with her hand in his. 

With one last smile, Imelda stepped with Héctor through the closed door and toward the rising sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Post that inspired this fic can be found here: http://daughterofthemoon99.tumblr.com/post/170510161667/ive-seen-a-bunch-of-aus-where-coco-is-the-one-who


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